Yet More Pinboard Tips, Again

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Another week without a sponsor so another week of Pinboard tips instead.

Before we begin, go ahead and get Brett Terpstra’s CSS for beautifying Pinboard. That’s not a tip, it’s a pre-requisite. It’s pretty.

I’ve written of other ways to beautify Pinboard, but Brett’s is the easiest and I neglected to mention it before.

Quick Edit Groups

Pinboard is my archive of web content. To get the most value out of the resources I like to go in and clean up meta data. The easiest way to do this is with the quick edit pane for bookmark groups.

Select a tag that needs to be changed. All bookmarks will be displayed. Click the “this page” link and then click the edit link. In this example I need to convert a “maestro” tag to “keyboardmaestro” so I add the desired tag to all bookmarks and deleted the undesired tags.

Stars

Pinboard stars are pretty basic and I use them for a basic follow-up list. I use stars like a quick temporary tag bundle to highlight the things I want to review or read that day. Stars can be applied much more easily than a tag and are quickly cleared with the group editing function described above.

Project tags

In my little Pinboard world, tags that are prefixed with an underscore are part of a project. This has two benefits. First, the tags are easily identified as representing a project. Second, all project tags are sorted alphabetically with projects at the top.

Hidden tags

I collect bookmarks that relate to my job. I mark those particular entries as private so that they do not show up in my public bookmark list. But I also don’t want my work related tags to be browseable either. Prefix a tag with a period to make it invisible to the public as well. Of course, I can’t actually show a screenshot of that.

Cached Pages and the Pro Account

Here’s a the best reason to upgrad to the Pinboard archive account ($25/year): All bookmarks are cached in case a page goes away. Pinboard cache is the real deal. Dependencies like images and files are cached in addition to the html.

Here’s an example of a cached page. You need to be logged into Pinboard to follow the link but if you do, you will notice something interesting. It looks like you are visiting a page on Macdrifter, but you are not. You are seeing a cached page that is stored on Pinboard. It’s an archive of the page as it existed when cached.1

Here’s a little Alfred query to perform a full text search on your Pinboard bookmarks:

Just use this search string:

http://pinboard.in/search/?query={query}&mine=Search+Mine&fulltext=on

Here’s the search string for a full text search on all public bookmarks:

http://pinboard.in/search/?query={query}&all=Search+All&fulltext=on

To wrap up, if you like Pinboard, you probably will like the man that made it, Maciej Cegłowski. Here’s a great Wired interview.

  1. Here’s a little secret. If you’re really nice about it and not in a rush, you can get a complete download of all of the cached pages. My last backup of my bookmark archive was 4GB and included every page as HTML with the embeded images. ↩︎