I’m working on an open-source social bookmarking site in Elixir that is API compatible with delicious/pinboard. Its named linkhut and it’s currently able to import your bookmarks from pinboard and browser exports.
Two things that I think are very important in a bookmarking app (and why I‘ve been working on making one of my own on and off for a while): open source and offering an API for other tools to build upon. The current API on linkhut aims to be bug for bug compatible with pinboard while being more OAuth-y.
I’m still working on a snapshotting feature similar to pinboard’s, once that’s ready I think I’ll call 1.0 complete. Perhaps I’ll do a Show HN then.
Interesting! Got an account, but I wonder how you/we are going to pay for it. Even with just a few million bookmarks you're going to need a non-trivial DB setup, and (according to some napkin maths on my Pinboard account) ~2.5 MB of storage per bookmark for the snapshotting feature.
It's weird that this is at least the third iteration of "bookmarks on the web" that I've used. My trajectory has basically been del.icio.us > delicious > pinboard > linkhut (still kicking the tires on the latter though, staying on Pinboard for now but hope it doesn't stop working).
I've been a pinboard user for ~6 years and I won't be renewing my subscription.
After a few years of using it I signed up for an archival account (which costs extra $39 per year). My credit card was charged, but I wasn't able to archive any page; the option to do so was never there. I emailed support (I guess it goes directly to Maciej) and NEVER got an answer, despite being a paid customer and following up several times. I ended up having to do a charge-back on my credit card. Very unprofessional.
On the flip side, that made me look into self hosting and now I happily run a linkding [1] instance on my NAS. I never really cared about the social aspect of it.
In the old, good days of del.icio.us social aspect was really robust. People were putting lots of stuff online. It was easy for me to find an academic or author I liked and dig through her bookmarks to my delight and betterment. It was still just the old good internet with real people online, sharing really interesting stuff. I would also post lots of stuff and we used sharing features with friends a lot (you could actually add #for:username).
I would be happy to have access to some delicious dumps, I know people made them before delicious went down.
The archiving happens automatically; you shouldn't need to do anything except request an archive backup[1]. Unfortunately those requests are not honoured, and haven't been for a long time (my last successful backup was in July 2020).
Yup. I have an archival account and none of my archived articles work. Some of them show an error, I hit the button to recrawl, but that just results in the error reappearing after a while. Others don’t show an error, but when I want to view the archived version, it says it didn’t find it. So I have a bunch of links in there, which already link-rotted, and weren’t successfully archived by Pinboard.
I’m considering moving to just using the SavePage (or whatever it was called) browser extension with a text file for the metadata (url, tags, titles, notes) on a NAS.
Ah my memory is blurry in the specifics. I think the issue was then that the archived link never showed up. Definitely it didn't work. I checked an rechecked the FAQ to make sure that in fact it wasn't working for me, and it wasn't that I didn't know how to use it.
--
Actually... I just checked my emails. My account never upgraded after payment (it was still standard) and the check-mark didn't appear next to my links. And of course there was no way for me to see the archived page or request an archive backup.
Was a Pinboard user since year 1 was my favorite online service for years,but the site went to trash after the creator became obsessed with politics in 2016 and moved his focus to tweeting and poli-larping rather than his customers.
This is true, even though I personally think his political thinking and rhetoric is brilliant and valuable. It doesn’t excuse him of taking care of the people who take care of him. Spend a few hours on your business, Maciej!
As a power user (21k bookmarks, 16k tags) I'm sorry to see Pinboard dying. I don't want any more features, but the killer feature introduced a few years, ago, archiving, is long dead:
> You asked to download your archive on 2022-10-04 17:36:42.
> You'll get email once the download link is ready.
Yeah, nah. I've requested this many times since it stopped working, and that was probably more than a year ago now.
Fortunately XML/HTML/JSON backups still work, so moving to another service should be easy.
Follow-up: Weirdly, it seems the backend for the archive feature is working fine - it's reporting what looks like a correct number of bookmarks, and says the backup is currently 51 GB, up from 30 GB when I last downloaded in July 2020. I guess there's an automation step missing (including throttling!), and then it could just run itself.
I've seen people (on here?) suggest that Maciej is on a long period of leave from Pinboard, and will definitely return to breathe fresh life into the product. But I don't think I've seen an official statement from him to that effect, not on the blog anyway https://blog.pinboard.in/
I'm a paying Pinboard customer (switched from a grandfathered-in one-time payment to an annual archival subscription). I've loved Pinboard for a long time, and really want to continue to love it.
It's felt to me for a long time that Maciej is burnt out and Pinboard is on a slow death spiral. It's one thing to leave good-enough alone and not develop new features, but it's another to not fix the things that are broken and let the product continue to gather rust - especially when you've moved your customers from one-time payments to subscriptions.
It's really too bad - it seemed like there could have been an enormous amount of inertia after the rather poetic del.icio.us acquisition, and the release of the archival feature was promising.
I'm still hopeful though, and that's why so far I continue to pay my $40/year.
I'm a Pinboard user and am happy with the bookmarklet which in my experience works flawlessly.
But... I (almost) never lookup any of my bookmarks. Googling is faster -- and safer, since it's possible I'm wrong and didn't actually bookmark what I'm looking for.
Bookmarking satisfies the mind; it's a bit like hoarding. Maybe the best bookmarking service would be a mock interface that doesn't actually do anything.
Ever since I found the 'highlight or hide search engine results' extension I have pretty much never browsed raindrop directly for technical stuff. I do still keep it around for the webpage highlights and tagging my twitter likes, though.
I agree as I've been in the same position but if you don't tag these properly then they are almost useless. Heavy bookmarker nowadays, 10s of thousands and I search it before I google because HIGH chances are it's something I've encountered before, even just a small tag like {math} helps greatly, even better, {math}, {vectors}, {gamedev}. I even dump research sessions there, eg. if I spend time on a gnarly bug or im grokking a new topic like ml and at the end I have 30 tabs open I save these as a group and label it as such "android opengl mapbox rendering issue", "math for ml" etc. One of the most annoying things is finding the perfect link and you know you did but can't find it again when you need to. Also god forbid you end up on a stackexchange site or forum and find yourself as the one answering (has caught me many times) [1].
This is happening to me right now! There's a bug in Reaper (a DAW) about handling gamepads. I found out that the bug was submitted first in... 2009, got no response from the devs and was not fixed. It does feel lonely sometimes.
Pinboard's performance was ultimately what led me to abandon it in the end.
I really like Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. It supports both hierarchy and tags and, if you export your Pinboard bookmarks to html, the file will include the tags which Firefox will preserve just fine when it imports everything.
I don't use Firefox as my day to day browser but all of my bookmarks live in there and I can search them from there much faster than any website. Those bookmarks live in a sqlite file which is easy to browse (good luck reverse engineering its schema though) so if anyone fancied knocking up a command line tool to search it I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult.
I realise this is a comparison article with a funny intro but I honestly don't understand that when you have a _list of links_ that you need to share with students you chose a third party website and then act shocked pikachu when that third party website has a hick-up.
There are hundreds of fool-save options that make it so you don't have to depend on a third party, here are some: You could email the links to students. List them on the personal website that this is written on. Have a reader that lists them. Co-host them with the rest of the assignment.
Man, I hope Pinboard stays up awhile longer. Genuinely one of my favorite simple, reliable internet tools. I don't need new features, I just need it to continue to exist.
Definitely, pinboard still does exactly what it's supposed to - store my bookmarks. I've got 17780 bookmarks[1] at the moment. I didn't try the auto archiving, but I happily switched to the new basic level payment model when he asked. It's been a stable part of my life for more than a decade.
It feels weird for you to address one positive comment here but not any of the folks saying they’re running into persistent issues with both their accounts and with attempting to get a response from support.
Readit News
The flagship instance is: https://ln.ht
The source code is hosted here: https://sr.ht/~mlb/linkhut/
The documentation: https://docs.linkhut.org/introduction.html
Two things that I think are very important in a bookmarking app (and why I‘ve been working on making one of my own on and off for a while): open source and offering an API for other tools to build upon. The current API on linkhut aims to be bug for bug compatible with pinboard while being more OAuth-y.
I’m still working on a snapshotting feature similar to pinboard’s, once that’s ready I think I’ll call 1.0 complete. Perhaps I’ll do a Show HN then.
Are you open to external contributions? If so, what's a good/useful place to start?
EDIT: if I would self-host this, I would want to run it in a Docker container. Is that something where I could help?
Could also be "outsourced" to archive.org and submitted there for the user (and to the benefit of others).
I could be mistake but isn’t a site like Pinboard largely static.
Not if you want to make AND operations with tags (which is crucial functionality for bookmarking).
After a few years of using it I signed up for an archival account (which costs extra $39 per year). My credit card was charged, but I wasn't able to archive any page; the option to do so was never there. I emailed support (I guess it goes directly to Maciej) and NEVER got an answer, despite being a paid customer and following up several times. I ended up having to do a charge-back on my credit card. Very unprofessional.
On the flip side, that made me look into self hosting and now I happily run a linkding [1] instance on my NAS. I never really cared about the social aspect of it.
[1] https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding
I would be happy to have access to some delicious dumps, I know people made them before delicious went down.
[1] https://pinboard.in/settings/backup
I’m considering moving to just using the SavePage (or whatever it was called) browser extension with a text file for the metadata (url, tags, titles, notes) on a NAS.
--
Actually... I just checked my emails. My account never upgraded after payment (it was still standard) and the check-mark didn't appear next to my links. And of course there was no way for me to see the archived page or request an archive backup.
https://github.com/jonschoning/espial
Fortunately XML/HTML/JSON backups still work, so moving to another service should be easy.
Do we know if he's okay?
It's felt to me for a long time that Maciej is burnt out and Pinboard is on a slow death spiral. It's one thing to leave good-enough alone and not develop new features, but it's another to not fix the things that are broken and let the product continue to gather rust - especially when you've moved your customers from one-time payments to subscriptions.
It's really too bad - it seemed like there could have been an enormous amount of inertia after the rather poetic del.icio.us acquisition, and the release of the archival feature was promising.
I'm still hopeful though, and that's why so far I continue to pay my $40/year.
But... I (almost) never lookup any of my bookmarks. Googling is faster -- and safer, since it's possible I'm wrong and didn't actually bookmark what I'm looking for.
Bookmarking satisfies the mind; it's a bit like hoarding. Maybe the best bookmarking service would be a mock interface that doesn't actually do anything.
[1] - Slightly related, https://xkcd.com/979/
This is happening to me right now! There's a bug in Reaper (a DAW) about handling gamepads. I found out that the bug was submitted first in... 2009, got no response from the devs and was not fixed. It does feel lonely sometimes.
I really like Firefox's built-in bookmark manager. It supports both hierarchy and tags and, if you export your Pinboard bookmarks to html, the file will include the tags which Firefox will preserve just fine when it imports everything.
I don't use Firefox as my day to day browser but all of my bookmarks live in there and I can search them from there much faster than any website. Those bookmarks live in a sqlite file which is easy to browse (good luck reverse engineering its schema though) so if anyone fancied knocking up a command line tool to search it I'm sure it wouldn't be difficult.
There are hundreds of fool-save options that make it so you don't have to depend on a third party, here are some: You could email the links to students. List them on the personal website that this is written on. Have a reader that lists them. Co-host them with the rest of the assignment.
My first thought was also “file -> save as” and share the html.
But does he necessarily know how to host an html page? Maybe he needs the tags page to be updated throughout the semester?
Regardless, he is right to feel that pinboard owed it to him to give him a heads-ups on depreciation of a feature.
--pinboarding since 2011