
Pinboard Turns Eleven - bishnu
https://blog.pinboard.in/2020/07/pinboard_is_eleven/
======
danesparza
"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
Maciej is an outstanding writer. I recommend reading his blog
([https://idlewords.com/](https://idlewords.com/)) if you haven't already.

------
tptacek
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
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.

------
thaumaturgy
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.

~~~
bachmeier
> ...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.

~~~
skeppy
I tried Pinboard earlier this year. I found it too slow and was having issues
with just general timeouts trying to categorize my bookmarks.

I requested a refund and got it straightaway. Along with a kind reply from the
owner. No issues. (I think I had paid via PayPal so I was hardly worried).
Also... $22.

Must everything be a free trial? There’s a lot of issues and costs associated
with that for businesses (and increasingly regulation).

Now that I see this post from the owner, I’m inclined to sign back up again. I
could have been one of those actually attempting to do a mass import when he
was fixing it. And him being on 10-year old tech probably greatly contributed
to my personal experience.

As the product itself goes, I think it’s worthy and useful. Having it be
mobile-friendly will be helpful not so much for me but when I want to share a
list of links to some other people I know who haven’t used a full-size
keyboard in five years.

~~~
idlewords
Hey, thanks for reconsidering the site! It sounds like you caught things in
mid-maintenance, or on a day when someone decided to crawl everything with no
pause between requests.

For what it's worth, one feature I want to make work on the site is "create a
sharable list of links to give people", it's a use case that comes up a lot.

~~~
pcglue
While you're here, add a "used none" filter (alongside existing "used once")
in tag editor please?

~~~
idlewords
There's no such thing, though. All tags are on at least one bookmark by
definition.

~~~
pcglue
But when I delete the last bookmark for a given tag, I still see the tag in
the tag editor, even after a page refresh. And I can still click on the tag
which brings up 0 bookmarks. Does it just take a while to be removed?

~~~
pcglue
OK, never mind, it just takes a while for it to be deleted (around 10-15
seconds). I've just been impatient.

~~~
idlewords
Yeah, it's done by a background script. But genuine orphan tags should not be
possible.

------
l0b0
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.

------
Normille
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.

~~~
lilyball
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.

~~~
Normille
I'm on Android not iOS. But I use the Pinboard app. When I want to save a
webpage, I use the "share link" menu [under the browser hamburger menu] to
send it to the Pinboard app.

~~~
lordfosco
Definitely check out Pinkt for Pinboard [0]. It is a rather new Android Client
for Pinboard which is actively maintained and has quite a nice UI - and
besides that it is OSS.

[0]:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fibelatti....](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fibelatti.pinboard)

------
unlimit
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.

------
js2
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
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
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.

------
torb-xyz
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.

------
greyman
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.

------
washicalendar
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
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
> 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

~~~
aglionby
> system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for
> the same things over and over again

Yep, this often frustratingly turns nothing up for me. Hence, Pinboard :)

------
mogaal
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

------
c1c2c3
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
I run www.historio.us and I reply to emails :P

~~~
idlewords
He does! And unless I'm wrong, historio.us has been around as long as Pinboard
but never gets half the HN love.

~~~
StavrosK
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
Enjoy, and congratulations on running a long-lived solvent business that
actually answers its email.

~~~
StavrosK
Thank you, and likewise, congratulations for running a long-lived successful
business!

------
QuinnWilton
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.

------
jermier
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/)

------
zerfall
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.

------
diroussel
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.

------
werid
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.

------
stevewilhelm
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.

~~~
teejmya
Thats very impressive. I joined in September 27, 2011 and have only 1,830
bookmarks.

------
yinka
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
"Abandoned graveyard" is the whole bookmarking business model.

------
kome
I use Pinboard since April 22, 2010. And I use it every day since then.

Best $6,28 I ever spent...

------
Macha
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.

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

~~~
dredmorbius
2 years:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20110709213326/https://blog.pinb...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110709213326/https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/07/two_years_of_pinboard/)

3 years:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinbo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20120713030912/http://blog.pinboard.in/2012/07/pinboard_turns_three/)

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
> Nine

Something happened in 2018. There are no stats for that year too.

~~~
wingerlang
> Every year when I don't forget I try to publish the same stats

This implies he just forgot about it.

------
slyall
You fixed my [twitter search] bug!

~~~
dewey
Which one is that? I'm still trying to find a way to exclude the "twitter"
tagged results from my searches.

~~~
slyall
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.

------
trevyn
No mention of the price increase? Hm.

~~~
galfarragem
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.

------
techntoke
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

~~~
astrange
Is that your requirements doc? “As a customer, I want a bookmarking tool
written in Go that uses yaml files”?

~~~
techntoke
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).

