10 ms·

Pinboard Turns Eleven

234 points by bishnu 6y ago

diroussel 6y ago
Note that this blog post is from 2020, but when I visit https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ then the top post is from 2017. So many the technology refresh did break something! ;-) Disclaimer: I'm a customer.
Brajeshwar 6y ago
Wow! And thanks for such a great service. I have been a happy customer since 2013 and I believe I bought one of your promo - pay for lifetime account with some $10 or so. :-)
baddox 6y ago
Some of the previous anniversary links are 404s. :)
- idlewords 6y ago
  Should have bookmarked them!
  - niel 6y ago
    This is great :) idlewords is the author. Not directly related to this post, but I highly recommend his other writing too. Gluten Free Antarctica is a personal favourite: https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  2 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709213326/https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/07/two_years_of_pinboard/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110709213326/https://blog.pinb... 3 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/07/pinboard_turns_three/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinbo... 4 years (broken HTML in the elevenversary post): https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/07/pinboard_is_four_years_old/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/07/pinboard_is_four_years_old/ 5 years (broken HTML in the elevenversary post): https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/ 6--7 and 10 are valid. Nine is apparently Right Out.
  - huhtenberg 6y ago
    > Nine Something happened in 2018. There are no stats for that year too.
    - wingerlang 6y ago
      > Every year when I don't forget I try to publish the same stats This implies he just forgot about it.
torb-xyz 6y ago
I don’t think there is any service I’ve been more happy with the last decade than this one. The (optional) PDF archival in particular is great. I also appreciate that since I pay for it and it’s not freemium or anything, it won’t go away in a attempt to please investors.
slyall 6y ago
You fixed my [twitter search] bug!
- dewey 6y ago
  Which one is that? I'm still trying to find a way to exclude the "twitter" tagged results from my searches.
  - slyall 6y ago
    Mine was the opposite. It stopping including any tweets I made after 3 July 2017 in my searches. It appeared to be still downloading them, just they were not included in searches. I think the bug was still present a few months ago. No idea if others were affected or just me. I also saw a bug where it didn't include the end of tweets (possibly some sort of character limit). But that was pretty minor.
unlimit 6y ago
11 years? Wow. And here I am, ever since I saw this project I have been wanting to start something and its 11 years of just thinking. I need to get going.
trevyn 6y ago
No mention of the price increase? Hm.
- galfarragem 6y ago
  Maybe I'm being unfair but (solo?) people get bored. People get bored of maintaining, polishing or developing new features once the revenue stream is consistent. The product stagnates. Income stream starts to dry. People that once could manage frugally get used to have plenty. What do they do to get back on track? They increase prices. This is the beggining of the end. An order of magnitude smaller, but been there.
- NelsonMinar 6y ago
  Just looked; it's $22 to sign up now. That's quite a change!
kome 6y ago
I use Pinboard since April 22, 2010. And I use it every day since then. Best $6,28 I ever spent...
thaumaturgy 6y ago
Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari. ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.
- dna_polymerase 6y ago
  I can recommend PushPin on iOS for that, it's another ten bucks (once) but well worth it if you are constantly on iOS devices and need Pinboard.
  - thaumaturgy 6y ago
    Nice! Thank you.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  December 2009, 64179 bookmarks (2298 dead!), 2998 tags. Almost all of those are automatic, though, from Twitter/Instagram/Pocket/RSS favouriting thanks to their own account linking and IFTTT.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  > ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing, but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Yes, Microsoft is horrible, but they're also spectacularly wealthy. Ultimately I didn't subscribe. Businesses need to ask from time to time if their business model is the right one for the current year. Expecting people that don't know you to give you $22 for a bookmarking service, without a trial period, might be wishful thinking in 2020.
QuinnWilton 6y ago
I know this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion, but I'm another happy user who loves the product and uses it daily. I feel like it gives me the superpower of being able to answer any question my teammates have with a dump of my favourite books / essays / papers on the subject.
c1c2c3 6y ago
I like pinboard but when I had problems with my archival account a couple of years ago I didn't receive any response to emails even though I chased for months. No longer subscribe but would love to find a similar alternative. Maybe poor customer service is the reason for the number of active customers dropping off.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I run www.historio.us and I reply to emails :P
  - idlewords 6y ago
    He does! And unless I'm wrong, historio.us has been around as long as Pinboard but never gets half the HN love.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Most of that is on me, I haven't given it the love it deserves, but I'm currently rewriting it and will be modernizing it, making it responsive, and adding new features.
      - idlewords 6y ago
        Enjoy, and congratulations on running a long-lived solvent business that actually answers its email.
        StavrosK 6y ago
        Thank you, and likewise, congratulations for running a long-lived successful business!
    - serf 6y ago
      replying to a goading competitor rather than an honest now-former customer with a legitimate complaint strikes me as a real classy business move. just my opinion. (i'm a customer, I love pinboard, and this affects nothing as far as i'm concerned.. I haven't ever needed customer service -- it just strikes me as rude.)
techntoke 6y ago
Would love to see a Go-based bookmarking server (no JavaScript) and CLI/ncurses app that uses yaml/toml/json files for bookmarks: google: tags: - search engine url: https://google.com duckduckgo: tags: - search engine url: https://duckduckgo.com
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- astrange 6y ago
  Is that your requirements doc? “As a customer, I want a bookmarking tool written in Go that uses yaml files”?
  - techntoke 6y ago
    No, I am not a customer because I do not believe bookmarks should be something that you pay to host in the cloud. However, for a self-hosted alternative my suggestion would be awesome and likely superior as it could be synced with any provider (Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, etc).
l0b0 6y ago
Member since 2012 (ah wut, I still have the activation email!), after migrating (easily) from a dying Delicious. Thank you so much for running this! As far as actually useful web services go (and holy crap is this useful!) it's by far the most stable I've ever used, and it never got bogged down in useless crap like 99% of other web services which constantly need to pivot while looking for a way to actually make money. It's been a frickin' journey. ~2004, started using Delicious. ~2005, built my own search site because Delicious couldn't handle searching through a few thousand bookmarks with a few thousand tags! 2006, contacted by a researcher looking into tag clouds because mine had more unique tags than bookmarks. 2012, migrated to Pinboard for a fixed lifetime fee. Best money I ever spent! Today, heard about the bookmark archive functionality and signed up immediately.
greyman 6y ago
Pinboard is ok, but recently I found myself to either just webclip the article into evernote, or make a note about it in Roam Research. Somehow just having tagged links doesn't work for me anymore.
Macha 6y ago
I got the bookmark sync one time purchase account years ago and used it for a couple of years but these days I just use Firefox sync and it solves most of what I cared about.
mogaal 6y ago
Very recently I deployed (in my personal VPS) espial (https://github.com/jonschoning/espial https://github.com/jonschoning/espial) which basically a self-hosted pinboard clone. I'm extremely happy with it. I wish it had a browser plugin but besides that it is amazing
Normille 6y ago
Oh dear. I'm a positive newbie here! Found my original receipt; 1st Jan 2015 for the princely sum of $10,60 for lifetime membership. And I only have a measley 1680 links saved. It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain. I must admit my heart sank a bit when I read about the rewrite opening the door to new features. For my uses, Pinboard is pretty much perfect as is [and I've never noticed any problems using it on mobile]. I really hope the developer doesn't start adding loads of extra bells and whistles [read "bloat"] to try and attract new users. I just want my bookmarking service to be boring, reliable and so unintrusive that most of the time I forget it even exists... til I see an article like this on HN. PS: Off-topic. But I really like the way "maciej" writes. He comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth, self-deprecating and funny guy. Such a refreshing change from all the 'trying-far-too-hard-to-be-hipster-cool' writing out there at the moment.
- azeirah 6y ago
  Having followed Maciej for a couple of years, I seriously doubt he'd ever fall into the trap of feature creep. He's one of the most pragmatic software engineers, if not people, I've ever encountered.
  - idlewords 6y ago
    Also possibly the laziest man in north america!
    - dnquark 6y ago
      The Russian and German sign-up page still reflects the old price. Story checks out! (Although I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't a fellow Slav discount.) But with a name like "five nines software" customer expectations should be implicitly tempered ;)
- lilyball 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what do you use to store and search bookmarks on mobile? Both the old (third-party) iOS app I used to use and the old macOS app I used to use have stopped working years ago due to neglect. So I use the service pretty sparingly on desktop and pretty much not at all on mobile.
werid 6y ago
I imported my bookmarks into pinboard, but found it quite a chore to go through them and tag them properly, so I abandoned that. Firefox sync keeps my bookmarks available everywhere anyways. Now I use pinboard for my youtube subscriptions, every time I subscribe to someone on youtube, I add it to pinboard and tag it. Very useful when your subscriptions range from several different sports to tech or gaming. Would do same for instagram but I have too many subscriptions and it's useless when someone changes their @account. They could really do with a lists feature ala twitter.
zerfall 6y ago
I've signed up in September 2010 and been a loyal user ever since. Pinboard is pretty much my archive: cool things I've seen, project ideas, solutions, etc.
danesparza 6y ago
"Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me. Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary." OMG. I think I stopped and laughed for a solid 30 seconds when I read this. I don't think I've ever felt so "seen" in my whole 25 years as a programmer.
- flobosg 6y ago
  Maciej is an outstanding writer. I recommend reading his blog (https://idlewords.com/ https://idlewords.com/) if you haven't already.
washicalendar 6y ago
Can you all share your workflow/use cases with this and other bookmarking services? I’m geniounly curious because the way I treat bookmarks is that they are temporary links I wanna go back to, so they all end up being deleted sooner rather than later. When I want to visit a website I just type in the website’s name in my browser and either let autocomplete do its magic, or just let it take me to Google where I tap on the first link. The idea of keeping bookmarks saved and organized/tagged is alien to me.
- aglionby 6y ago
  I have two use cases. The first is to keep track of interesting articles I find and plausibly want to refer back to in the future. A 3rd party browser extension and mobile app make saving very easy, and then I tag each item with a high-level category. This is also pretty painless, and brings a lot of value (otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful). An example is my 'long reads' tag https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/ https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/. The 'unread' feature is also useful here - I've got >10 long reads banked for when I'm looking for things to do. The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/ https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.
  - washicalendar 6y ago
    > otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful Yeah I think this is my problem. I’m on iOS so I use Safari’s reading list feature to keep track of articles I want to read. But it’s just a dump, no organization, and after I read an article I don’t know what to “do” with it anymore so I just delete it. I think I need to figure out a system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for the same things over and over again. Pinboard seems like it could help
jermier 6y ago
If I have the time, I like to open up /recent[0] to see what's in there. /popular[1] is good too, but with /recent you usually find some obscure less popular (but still good) link that always surprises me. I am glad the Internet still has little rabbit-holes like this that you can get lost in. [0] https://pinboard.in/recent/ https://pinboard.in/recent/ [1] https://pinboard.in/popular/ https://pinboard.in/popular/
js2 6y ago
That picture of past you... what is going on? On the table I see the following beverages: wine, liquor, coffee, water. There's also a cheese grater. And what looks to be a bottle of pills. Okay. Now on the window sill behind you is ... I don't even know, coffee, a cleaning product, some napkins maybe, another wine bottle and other sundry items. This looks like maybe a table shoved into the corner of a tiny restaurant, away from the main area. Apparently it's night time. I guess it's as good a place to write code as any other. :-)
- GuiA 6y ago
  From a past update: "I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania." https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/ I suspect that's the kitchen :) My own kitchen table during this confinement period isn't too dissimilar...
  - idlewords 6y ago
    Yeah, that's my Romanian kitchen. The bottles are Transnistrian cognac, local red wine, and the empty glass that looks like a cooling tower is a Turkish tea glass. These are the rocket fuels that built Pinboard. The white bottle is just Greek table salt, though. No fun pills.
stevewilhelm 6y ago
I became a Pinboard customer on December 17, 2010 and currently have 7,940 bookmarks, the most recent pin was added yesterday. It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.
- bantunes 6y ago
  Do you get a lot of value from them?
- teejmya 6y ago
  Thats very impressive. I joined in September 27, 2011 and have only 1,830 bookmarks.
tptacek 6y ago
Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks. But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut. What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked. I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.
- idlewords 6y ago
  Thanks for the testimonial! I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.
- ralphc 6y ago
  18,000+ bookmarks for me, although I started with del.icio.us back in 2006 and imported them when it went away. So yeah, I'm a fan.
yinka 6y ago
Pinboard is an abandoned graveyard, I requested a download of my archived bookmarks, got it like 6 months later - not 'under an hour' as promised, better late than never I suppose. I wont be renewing.
- idlewords 6y ago
  "Abandoned graveyard" is the whole bookmarking business model.

234 points by bishnu 6y ago

Note that this blog post is from 2020, but when I visit https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ https://blog.pinboard.in/blog/ then the top post is from 2017. So many the technology refresh did break something! ;-) Disclaimer: I'm a customer.

Brajeshwar 6y ago

Wow! And thanks for such a great service. I have been a happy customer since 2013 and I believe I bought one of your promo - pay for lifetime account with some $10 or so. :-)

baddox 6y ago

Some of the previous anniversary links are 404s. :)

idlewords 6y ago
Should have bookmarked them!
- niel 6y ago
  This is great :) idlewords is the author. Not directly related to this post, but I highly recommend his other writing too. Gluten Free Antarctica is a personal favourite: https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm https://idlewords.com/2018/12/gluten_free_antarctica.htm
dredmorbius 6y ago
2 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20110709213326/https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/07/two_years_of_pinboard/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110709213326/https://blog.pinb... 3 years: https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/07/pinboard_turns_three/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinbo... 4 years (broken HTML in the elevenversary post): https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/07/pinboard_is_four_years_old/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2013/07/pinboard_is_four_years_old/ 5 years (broken HTML in the elevenversary post): https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2014/07/pinboard_turns_five/ 6--7 and 10 are valid. Nine is apparently Right Out.
- huhtenberg 6y ago
  > Nine Something happened in 2018. There are no stats for that year too.
  - wingerlang 6y ago
    > Every year when I don't forget I try to publish the same stats This implies he just forgot about it.

torb-xyz 6y ago

I don’t think there is any service I’ve been more happy with the last decade than this one. The (optional) PDF archival in particular is great. I also appreciate that since I pay for it and it’s not freemium or anything, it won’t go away in a attempt to please investors.

slyall 6y ago

You fixed my [twitter search] bug!

dewey 6y ago
Which one is that? I'm still trying to find a way to exclude the "twitter" tagged results from my searches.
- slyall 6y ago
  Mine was the opposite. It stopping including any tweets I made after 3 July 2017 in my searches. It appeared to be still downloading them, just they were not included in searches. I think the bug was still present a few months ago. No idea if others were affected or just me. I also saw a bug where it didn't include the end of tweets (possibly some sort of character limit). But that was pretty minor.

unlimit 6y ago

11 years? Wow. And here I am, ever since I saw this project I have been wanting to start something and its 11 years of just thinking. I need to get going.

trevyn 6y ago

No mention of the price increase? Hm.

galfarragem 6y ago
Maybe I'm being unfair but (solo?) people get bored. People get bored of maintaining, polishing or developing new features once the revenue stream is consistent. The product stagnates. Income stream starts to dry. People that once could manage frugally get used to have plenty. What do they do to get back on track? They increase prices. This is the beggining of the end. An order of magnitude smaller, but been there.
NelsonMinar 6y ago
Just looked; it's $22 to sign up now. That's quite a change!

kome 6y ago

I use Pinboard since April 22, 2010. And I use it every day since then. Best $6,28 I ever spent...

thaumaturgy 6y ago

Pinboard is my secret weapon for those obnoxious lists of citations I sometimes get to spackle onto the end of comments on the internet. I've been on there since December 27, 2010 (Merry Christmas to me), and currently have 8,698 bookmarks across 1,544 different tags. I'd have a few hundred more if I could hurry up and transfer all the open tabs from ios safari. ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers. I've dabbled with the API enough that I could pull everything down on fairly short notice, but I sure hope I won't need to anytime soon.

dna_polymerase 6y ago
I can recommend PushPin on iOS for that, it's another ten bucks (once) but well worth it if you are constantly on iOS devices and need Pinboard.
- thaumaturgy 6y ago
  Nice! Thank you.
zimpenfish 6y ago
December 2009, 64179 bookmarks (2298 dead!), 2998 tags. Almost all of those are automatic, though, from Twitter/Instagram/Pocket/RSS favouriting thanks to their own account linking and IFTTT.
bachmeier 6y ago
> ...so I'm genuinely worried about those declining user numbers My story might be relevant. I only recently learned about Pinboard. $22/year isn't terrible, but it's just a bookmarking service. Free trial? Nope - you need to pull out your credit card and fork over $22. You get seven days to request a refund. (Will I actually get it? No idea who's holding my money.) He's happy to boast about competitors disappearing, but I use OneNote, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. Yes, Microsoft is horrible, but they're also spectacularly wealthy. Ultimately I didn't subscribe. Businesses need to ask from time to time if their business model is the right one for the current year. Expecting people that don't know you to give you $22 for a bookmarking service, without a trial period, might be wishful thinking in 2020.

QuinnWilton 6y ago

I know this comment doesn't add anything to the discussion, but I'm another happy user who loves the product and uses it daily. I feel like it gives me the superpower of being able to answer any question my teammates have with a dump of my favourite books / essays / papers on the subject.

c1c2c3 6y ago

I like pinboard but when I had problems with my archival account a couple of years ago I didn't receive any response to emails even though I chased for months. No longer subscribe but would love to find a similar alternative. Maybe poor customer service is the reason for the number of active customers dropping off.

StavrosK 6y ago
I run www.historio.us and I reply to emails :P
- idlewords 6y ago
  He does! And unless I'm wrong, historio.us has been around as long as Pinboard but never gets half the HN love.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Most of that is on me, I haven't given it the love it deserves, but I'm currently rewriting it and will be modernizing it, making it responsive, and adding new features.
    - idlewords 6y ago
      Enjoy, and congratulations on running a long-lived solvent business that actually answers its email.
      - StavrosK 6y ago
        Thank you, and likewise, congratulations for running a long-lived successful business!
  - serf 6y ago
    replying to a goading competitor rather than an honest now-former customer with a legitimate complaint strikes me as a real classy business move. just my opinion. (i'm a customer, I love pinboard, and this affects nothing as far as i'm concerned.. I haven't ever needed customer service -- it just strikes me as rude.)

techntoke 6y ago

Would love to see a Go-based bookmarking server (no JavaScript) and CLI/ncurses app that uses yaml/toml/json files for bookmarks: google: tags: - search engine url: https://google.com duckduckgo: tags: - search engine url: https://duckduckgo.com

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
astrange 6y ago
Is that your requirements doc? “As a customer, I want a bookmarking tool written in Go that uses yaml files”?
- techntoke 6y ago
  No, I am not a customer because I do not believe bookmarks should be something that you pay to host in the cloud. However, for a self-hosted alternative my suggestion would be awesome and likely superior as it could be synced with any provider (Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, etc).

l0b0 6y ago

Member since 2012 (ah wut, I still have the activation email!), after migrating (easily) from a dying Delicious. Thank you so much for running this! As far as actually useful web services go (and holy crap is this useful!) it's by far the most stable I've ever used, and it never got bogged down in useless crap like 99% of other web services which constantly need to pivot while looking for a way to actually make money. It's been a frickin' journey. ~2004, started using Delicious. ~2005, built my own search site because Delicious couldn't handle searching through a few thousand bookmarks with a few thousand tags! 2006, contacted by a researcher looking into tag clouds because mine had more unique tags than bookmarks. 2012, migrated to Pinboard for a fixed lifetime fee. Best money I ever spent! Today, heard about the bookmark archive functionality and signed up immediately.

greyman 6y ago

Pinboard is ok, but recently I found myself to either just webclip the article into evernote, or make a note about it in Roam Research. Somehow just having tagged links doesn't work for me anymore.

Macha 6y ago

I got the bookmark sync one time purchase account years ago and used it for a couple of years but these days I just use Firefox sync and it solves most of what I cared about.

mogaal 6y ago

Very recently I deployed (in my personal VPS) espial (https://github.com/jonschoning/espial https://github.com/jonschoning/espial) which basically a self-hosted pinboard clone. I'm extremely happy with it. I wish it had a browser plugin but besides that it is amazing

Normille 6y ago

Oh dear. I'm a positive newbie here! Found my original receipt; 1st Jan 2015 for the princely sum of $10,60 for lifetime membership. And I only have a measley 1680 links saved. It's always a gamble with these one-time lifetime offers as you never know if the site's even going to be there in a few months time. But, even if Pinboard folded tomorrow, I'd still consider I got a great bargain. I must admit my heart sank a bit when I read about the rewrite opening the door to new features. For my uses, Pinboard is pretty much perfect as is [and I've never noticed any problems using it on mobile]. I really hope the developer doesn't start adding loads of extra bells and whistles [read "bloat"] to try and attract new users. I just want my bookmarking service to be boring, reliable and so unintrusive that most of the time I forget it even exists... til I see an article like this on HN. PS: Off-topic. But I really like the way "maciej" writes. He comes across as a genuinely down-to-earth, self-deprecating and funny guy. Such a refreshing change from all the 'trying-far-too-hard-to-be-hipster-cool' writing out there at the moment.

azeirah 6y ago
Having followed Maciej for a couple of years, I seriously doubt he'd ever fall into the trap of feature creep. He's one of the most pragmatic software engineers, if not people, I've ever encountered.
- idlewords 6y ago
  Also possibly the laziest man in north america!
  - dnquark 6y ago
    The Russian and German sign-up page still reflects the old price. Story checks out! (Although I was slightly disappointed that it wasn't a fellow Slav discount.) But with a name like "five nines software" customer expectations should be implicitly tempered ;)
lilyball 6y ago
Out of curiosity, what do you use to store and search bookmarks on mobile? Both the old (third-party) iOS app I used to use and the old macOS app I used to use have stopped working years ago due to neglect. So I use the service pretty sparingly on desktop and pretty much not at all on mobile.

werid 6y ago

I imported my bookmarks into pinboard, but found it quite a chore to go through them and tag them properly, so I abandoned that. Firefox sync keeps my bookmarks available everywhere anyways. Now I use pinboard for my youtube subscriptions, every time I subscribe to someone on youtube, I add it to pinboard and tag it. Very useful when your subscriptions range from several different sports to tech or gaming. Would do same for instagram but I have too many subscriptions and it's useless when someone changes their @account. They could really do with a lists feature ala twitter.

zerfall 6y ago

I've signed up in September 2010 and been a loyal user ever since. Pinboard is pretty much my archive: cool things I've seen, project ideas, solutions, etc.

danesparza 6y ago

"Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me. Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary." OMG. I think I stopped and laughed for a solid 30 seconds when I read this. I don't think I've ever felt so "seen" in my whole 25 years as a programmer.

flobosg 6y ago
Maciej is an outstanding writer. I recommend reading his blog (https://idlewords.com/ https://idlewords.com/) if you haven't already.

washicalendar 6y ago

Can you all share your workflow/use cases with this and other bookmarking services? I’m geniounly curious because the way I treat bookmarks is that they are temporary links I wanna go back to, so they all end up being deleted sooner rather than later. When I want to visit a website I just type in the website’s name in my browser and either let autocomplete do its magic, or just let it take me to Google where I tap on the first link. The idea of keeping bookmarks saved and organized/tagged is alien to me.

aglionby 6y ago
I have two use cases. The first is to keep track of interesting articles I find and plausibly want to refer back to in the future. A 3rd party browser extension and mobile app make saving very easy, and then I tag each item with a high-level category. This is also pretty painless, and brings a lot of value (otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful). An example is my 'long reads' tag https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/ https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/. The 'unread' feature is also useful here - I've got >10 long reads banked for when I'm looking for things to do. The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/ https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.
- washicalendar 6y ago
  > otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful Yeah I think this is my problem. I’m on iOS so I use Safari’s reading list feature to keep track of articles I want to read. But it’s just a dump, no organization, and after I read an article I don’t know what to “do” with it anymore so I just delete it. I think I need to figure out a system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for the same things over and over again. Pinboard seems like it could help

jermier 6y ago

If I have the time, I like to open up /recent[0] to see what's in there. /popular[1] is good too, but with /recent you usually find some obscure less popular (but still good) link that always surprises me. I am glad the Internet still has little rabbit-holes like this that you can get lost in. [0] https://pinboard.in/recent/ https://pinboard.in/recent/ [1] https://pinboard.in/popular/ https://pinboard.in/popular/

js2 6y ago

That picture of past you... what is going on? On the table I see the following beverages: wine, liquor, coffee, water. There's also a cheese grater. And what looks to be a bottle of pills. Okay. Now on the window sill behind you is ... I don't even know, coffee, a cleaning product, some napkins maybe, another wine bottle and other sundry items. This looks like maybe a table shoved into the corner of a tiny restaurant, away from the main area. Apparently it's night time. I guess it's as good a place to write code as any other. :-)

GuiA 6y ago
From a past update: "I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania." https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2019/07/i_cant_stop_winning/ I suspect that's the kitchen :) My own kitchen table during this confinement period isn't too dissimilar...
- idlewords 6y ago
  Yeah, that's my Romanian kitchen. The bottles are Transnistrian cognac, local red wine, and the empty glass that looks like a cooling tower is a Turkish tea glass. These are the rocket fuels that built Pinboard. The white bottle is just Greek table salt, though. No fun pills.

stevewilhelm 6y ago

I became a Pinboard customer on December 17, 2010 and currently have 7,940 bookmarks, the most recent pin was added yesterday. It's a great service. I recommend it to everyone.

bantunes 6y ago
Do you get a lot of value from them?
teejmya 6y ago
Thats very impressive. I joined in September 27, 2011 and have only 1,830 bookmarks.

tptacek 6y ago

Broken record: I get that people are really into tagging and I see how I could, like, instead of writing HN comments or playing Dark Souls, nurture and groom an elegant garden of them for my own 10,000 bookmarks. But that's not why I use Pinboard. It turns out ("bookmark people" apparently already know this) that a huge collection of bookmarks basically functions as a personal search engine. My primary interface to Pinboard is a "pin:" search engine shortcut. What makes this so effective for me is that if you have an archive account (you should have an archive account; it's the best money I've spent for a computer thing easily), Pinboard indexes the contents of PDF, so I can instantly search the contents of all the papers I've bookmarked. I don't even think about what I'm bookmarking, what to tag things, or even what to title them; I just cram 'em all in there and let search figure it out. And it works great. Pinboard is a steal.

idlewords 6y ago
Thanks for the testimonial! I thought bookmarking was incredibly stupid until Joshua Schachter explained it to me like this: when you save something, tag it with the words you would use to search for it six months later. It blew my mind and eventually gave me a livelihood.
ralphc 6y ago
18,000+ bookmarks for me, although I started with del.icio.us back in 2006 and imported them when it went away. So yeah, I'm a fan.

yinka 6y ago

Pinboard is an abandoned graveyard, I requested a download of my archived bookmarks, got it like 6 months later - not 'under an hour' as promised, better late than never I suppose. I wont be renewing.

idlewords 6y ago
"Abandoned graveyard" is the whole bookmarking business model.