pinboard

I’m probably done with IFTTT. I’ve waited for a business model and instead I get crazy service integrations I’ve never heard of. Now it looks like IFTTT integration with Pinboard will end in the near future and it’s ending for bad reasons. Browse through the amusing Twitter feed of @pinboard and you’ll see tweets like this: Tweet Link I am invited to join their private Developer Platform and feast on the rich analytics therein, which isn’t really my cup of tea

Pinboard will have a new pricing model in 2015, driven by the inability of people to read the current pricing page. Since the beginning, you paid once for a standard Pinboard account. The price for a perpetual license would go up based on the number of people that purchased it. The earlier you got in, the lower your one-time license cost. Pinboard also offers an annual service called an Archive account.

In case it’s not obvious, I think Pinboard is just great. I use it for anything that has a URL I want to remember. But it also means I have about 15,000 bookmarks. That’s where tagging comes in handy. I use several types of notation for my Pinboard tags. Here’s what’s been particularly useful for me over the years. Project Tags I tag large projects with an underscore prefix. A project aggregates bookmarks (and notes) that might otherwise be unrelated.

I’ve always really liked Pinswift as an iOS Pinboard client. It was the first client to support full text searching for archive accounts and the design is interesting and useful. The 1.3 update brings several welcome enhancements and support for the new iPhones. My favorite new feature is the smart title and description generation for new bookmarks. When adding a new bookmark from a link, Pinswift intelligently generates the title (like many Pinboard apps) as well as a succinct description.

This is the dumbest and most useful trick I have for Pinboard (in a long line of dumb Pinboard tips). Perform a search in the Pinboard web app.1 Now bookmark the resulting page in Pinboard. It’s pin-ception! I tag the bookmark with _query so I can see all of my saved queries on one Pinboard page. A Pinboard search can be limited to either just your own bookmarks or everyone’s. I give them a meaningful title to differentiate.

Just a friendly reminder, that if you follow my public Pinboard feed, you’ll find interesting reads such as the following: Bourbon County Stout Vintage Statistics JSON Mail Access Protocol Specification Famous Author’s Sleep Patterns 76,000 Pounds of Ribs Burn in Truck Fire The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits Feel free to thank me for not posting every link-article I find interesting.

A Pinswift bookmarklet (previous review) grabs the current browser page and sends it to the app. Nice.

Pinner is an iOS app for Pinboard.in junkies like me. I gave it a look when it first came out but the performance wasn’t good enough to keep up with the number of bookmarks I have in Pinboard. I’m happy to say that Pinner 2.0 is great. The caching and browsing is fast. I really like the addition of favicons to the bookmarks. It’s a nice little attention grabber when I’m browsing through my list looking for something to read.

Paperback is a new web service for reading Pinboard bookmarks formatted in a readable and non-distracting view. I’ve been testing it for a couple of months and it’s very nicely done. $15 per year is a pretty good value if you use Pinboard as your reading library, as I do. Here’s the elevator pitch: Read things Archive things back into Paperback (with tags or other metadata, if you’d like) Delete things I like some of the nice touches like logging in with a Pinboard token.

Here’s how the link posts work here on Macdrifter: Everything I read goes to Pinboard. At some point later, when I have time and energy, I try to pull out my favorites and post them here. Do you have that uncle that sends you “interesting” articles by email every day? Yeah, the link posts on Macdrifter are my version of that. If you want to see almost1 everything I read, you can either look in the side bar here on the site (rather than RSS)2 or subscribe to my public Pinboard RSS.