
Why Pinboard.in Is My Favorite Alternative Bookmarking Service to Delicious - bengross
http://www.messagingnews.com/onmessage/ben-gross/why-pinboardin-is-my-favorite-bookmarking-service
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acangiano
Another good alternative, albeit search-based, is <http://historio.us>.

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agraddy
I recently switched to historious after seeing it here on HackerNews, and I've
been very happy with it so far. It's a great bookmarking service; I'm
surprised it hasn't received more attention with the debacle going on at
Delicious.

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StavrosK
Thanks guys, the service is a bit backed up right now, with all the importers,
but the site should be responsive and functional otherwise. I greatly
appreciate everyone's support!

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nathanh
I just switch to Pinboard from delicious. I really like that I'll be able to
search and archive the content of my bookmarks. Here's what it took for me to
get started:

\- Exported bookmarks from delicious

\- Signed up and paid $25 for Pinboard (their non-archiving service is
cheaper)

\- Imported in to Pinboard (took a few hours because they are experiencing a
lot of traffic right now)

\- Removed my browser plugins for delicious and replaced with Pinboard
bookmarklets

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avinashv
> (took a few hours because they are experiencing a lot of traffic right now)

Honestly, I think that's unacceptable for a relatively unknown service that
charges a steep price ($25/year for _bookmarking_ is pretty crazy). To not get
good uptime and speedy access and have a bold red banner on the top of your
homepage claiming poor scaling is not encouraging.

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idlewords
I'm not sure what you're talking about. There was no downtime, and no slow
access.

We went from our normal rate of 5k bookmark writes per day to over 5 million
in a 24 hour period without going offline.

Hell, we didn't even get _slow_. Our median page load times stayed well under
a third of a second. We had no advance notice of the announcement and had to
handle the spike in traffic on the fly, on one server. Our competitors
crashed, we stayed up.

I'm pretty proud of this and I think our users got their money's worth from
Pinboard today.

~~~
callmevlad
Going from 5k to 5M is really impressive - congrats on your sudden impressive
growth!

However, the "there was no downtime" seems a bit disingenuous given my own
experience signing up for the service yesterday. I received many "service
unavailable" messages during signup, after clicking on the email verification
link, and finally after signing up. Searching Twitter at the time for
"Pinboard" showed that many other users were getting the same message (e.g.
<http://twitter.com/davekincaid/status/15520511979167744>) ... there were many
others, but unfortunately Twitter's 'older tweets' search doesn't seem to be
working now.

I actually didn't care that the service was down for me even though I had just
paid to sign up for it; I figured you guys were getting absolutely hammered by
the unexpected news around Delicious. However, seeing your response here was
surprising - either you didn't have monitoring tools set up to show you that
indeed there was downtime or we have a drastically different definition of
'downtime'.

~~~
idlewords
It's the former - on our end we didn't see any errors logged, and had no
trouble reaching the site. We did see sporadic reports on Twitter and tried to
chase them down, but there was so much going on we couldn't spend much time on
it. Eventually pvg made some apache config changes on the fly that seemed to
banish the problem for good.

If that was the general experience people had with the site last night, then
it absolutely was downtime.

~~~
callmevlad
Thanks for the response and insight - I definitely understand that it's hard
to keep track of sporadic issues especially when usage is exploding like yours
did in the last few days.

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supahfly_remix
As an aside, the creator of pinboard, is the anti-PG, (or at least the anti-PG
of 2005):

<http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm>

"But you, sir [PG], are no painter. And while you hack away at your terminal,
or ride your homemade Segway, we painters and musicians are going to be right
over here with all the wine, hash, and hot chicks."

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keyist
_"As an aside, the creator of pinboard, is the anti-PG, (or at least the anti-
PG of 2005)"_

That is an unfair and extremely misleading label to apply to the author:

\- your selective quote is immediately followed by "Hee hee", which most
readers would interpret to mean that said paragraph (or indeed the entire
post, since those are the last two words) is a somewhat good-natured poke.

\- the criticism in the post is scoped only to the hackers<=>painters analogy

\- elsewhere in the post he says "Graham is an excellent author when he sticks
to topics that he knows well"

Hardly anti-PG. He's just not a fan of the analogy PG used in some essays.
Don't drum up conflict where there is none.

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acconrad
It baffles me that people want to pay for something that is widely available
for free.

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jfb
I pay because I want to be the customer. If I am buying something, I am able
to exert market pressure on the provider. If I am a collection of poorly-
anonomized data being passed around from J. Random data mining company, I lose
this (admittedly, largely nominal) agency.

I pay for email, I pay for hosting photos, and I pay for pinboard.

~~~
w1ntermute
> I pay for email

Out of curiosity, who do you pay to host your email?

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cschmidt
In my case fastmail.fm, zenfolio.com, and pinboard.in.

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w1ntermute
How is their web UI compared to Gmail, for example? Do you feel like you're
missing out on any features, or do you access mail exclusively via a desktop
client?

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cschmidt
They have a really nice web GUI. I use it for access to my mail when I'm away
from my laptop, where I use Mail.app. I haven't used gmail enough to do a
direct comparison. The search is good, and you can set up very complicated
rules to file mail into folders.

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anateus
The archiving (caching of html+stylesheets+images) is what really makes this
service. I've had Delicious bookmarks disappear when people migrated blog
platforms, when Yahoo closed Geocities, and countless other occasions.

The only thing that can make it better is the ability to export the full
caches. It does let you export 25 bookmarks (and their caches) for offline
access.

I've been a member at the $25 level since regular membership was $6 :>

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marv_in
Unless I'm mistaken doesn't Diigo.com do all of these with a free account
even?

