Show HN: My pinboard-backed link blog(quinnternet.com) I recently re-jiggered my blog to use pinboard as it's CMS. A cron job runs once every 15 minutes and generates a static HTML file of my most recent 15 posts. Yes it is fairly limited in what it can do, but it's a great simple way to make what I already do on pinboard into a link blog. |
Pinboard has been awesome for this and a few other projects where I use it as a sort of URL import / processing queue. I have a specific set of tags that trigger different actions for the different services, things like taking a screenshot of a URL or posting the link to Twitter via IFTTT (which has good Pinboard support).
1 - http://www.bootstraphero.com/the-big-badass-list-of-twitter-...
Anyway, I''m following you now, so there's the super tangential tieback. And nice work!
I absolutely agree with your point. I actually didn't realize pinboard was a sharing service at all for the first few months that I had it. I wound up following one or two tech writers that I follow elsewhere but I've since forgotten about it and haven't really even looked to see what they're saving to pinboard.
BTW, your scroll.js has a commented-out section where you call 'pinboard.php', so I suppose you're using PHP to process your bookmarks. As the author of the PHP Pinboard API Client (github.com/kijin/pinboard-api), I'm curious whether you're using it, and if so, whether you have any suggestions for improving it.
I had built http://data.idleworx.com/DeliStream/ a while ago to pull streaming data from delicio.us. Might be time I updated it to pinboard.in (something similar to your project but more real-time and from all users).
A tumbler blog is sufficient enough in letting you gather links, quotes, videos, etc, etc, and it is free and fast.
If you pay a little more, Pinboard also gives you a snapshot of all the pages you ever bookmarked.
Take the analogy of doing the same in the offline world. You have a house, you have your stuff, some of which you keep inside your house and some in the garage. Would you rent a storage space to keep other people's stuff? You certainly wouldn't keep other people's stuff in your own garage to begin with, even if that stuff is "informational".
You see, there is a reason why Google is not in this business of bookmarking, nor do you see Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo or anyone else. The browsers provide this as a basic service, so you can keep the URLs in history or bookmarks manager. The online world would be a really silly place if people in general would have to pay to keep the website URLs.
Pinboard doesn't 'exist to charge me to gather other people's urls' it just gives me an excellent way of keeping track of links that I find useful and want to occasionally have access to (and does that across multiple computers/browsers which is great). Tumbler may be great for a few things, but I have thousands of bookmarks for example and tumblr would suck for that in my case ...
But apparently, Pinboard generates enough profit to make it sustainable without any ads. Which means there are enough people who pay $10 for an experience that they consider superior to their browser's own bookmark manager.
Why would you pay for a tourist/hiking map if you don't own any property that is shown on it? Presumably because you like the convenience of being able to pull it out at any time and study it in its full 40" glory without having to worry about your phone's data roaming rates. Why would you pay for an "enhanced" contact manager app if you don't own any of the phone numbers and email addresses that you manage with it? Presumably because the cost of the app is well justified by its improvements over the stock Contacts app. I don't see any silliness or irony in that. It's just a cost-benefit analysis that turned out to favor paying some guy a small amount of money to facilitate your interaction with third parties.