Managing your bookmarks with Pinboard.in

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If I ask a question, how many bookmarks do you have in your internet browsers, I bet you do not know or cannot count as it is all over the place 🙂 Me too. At least till I decided that I need to do something about it.

Over the years, we would all have accumulated a large (and for some, a gigantic) amount of bookmarks. We visited a site, we liked it, we bookmarked. Someone send us a link, we liked it, we bookmarked. And it all dropped into the bookmark manager in the browser but never properly filed (okay.. maybe some do but most don’t right.. HA). Most of us don’t really file our bookmarks.. 🙂

Where are they ? All in the bookmark manager of your favourite browser ? Can you reach for the same bookmark in another device (e.g. your tablet, your smartphone) considering that we usually nowadays surf the web on these devices ? Okie. You might even have used the Chrome bookmark sync or Firefox sync etc to keep your bookmark in sync but what if you are on another friend’s PC and want to access a particular bookmark (Dont think they like you to sync your bookmarks to theirs :p). To carry it even further, have you properly tag them with proper tags to make it easy to find them or at least categorize them into the right group (okay, this is probably too OCD like me).

So having a proper bookmark manager is quite good. Even better when it is in the cloud where you can reach for the bookmarks anytime, anywhere, any place and any device…

I am sure many have heard of Delicious and might have used it ? It is a free service and worth your time to explore. It is pretty good but for me, I paid $10 one time fee and is using this service called Pinboard.in. Dare I say I actually love it so much and very pleased with the $10 I paid. You might want to consider. Yes it cost money (and in this world of many free services, it must be weird but then I also believe in paying for quality products.. and Pinboard is one..). And it is a one time cost though.

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

The owner has an interesting way of charging. The more users, the more expensive. Funny 🙂

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

Visit their home page and then these resources to understand the services it provided. For example, the Tour Page. The Resources Page. And the HOWTO page.

For me, I used it daily. First, I exported all my bookmarks from IE, from Chrome, from Firefox, from iPad Safari, from iPhone Safari and unbelievable but I even have an archived bookmark list from my younger days sitting in my dropbox…. amazing… quite fun to see those sites I was interested in when young (and many has gone dead.. so sad).

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

I then imported them into Pinboard.in and then clean them up (visited each one to see if they are still available, check if I still want them, deleted the unwanted ones, tagged the ones I want so that they are properly categorised etc).

Let me share some of the SETTINGS page which will even explain the features of Pinboard.in better:

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

You can link Delicious, Instapaper, Readability etc to this bookmark manager. I don’t as it does not fit into my workflow… but I am sure many have good ideas on how to use this. One particular great idea is you can also EMAIL your bookmark to Pinboard.

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

The next setting is what I love most. The Privacy Setting. Now, you can always be “social” and share your bookmarks with everyone in the Pinboard community. I dont want to and so I can actually set a PRIVACY LOCK (like a complete lock down on privacy of my bookmarks). You can always set up various degree (e.g. share some bookmarks, not share some others, default your added bookmarks as private and only share them when you want etc…). The site by name is, after all, Social Bookmarking for Introverts

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

The next setting is importing your bookmarks. I have imported 2000+ bookmarks into the tool (only to clean them up later).

Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

Password setting and an API is also available for use with things like IFTTT (which, by the way, is SUPERB).
Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

Last set of settings are twitter linkage. Never really understood 🙂 Guess you can automatically import any links that appear on your Twitter account (and then later visit Pinboard.in to read the web page, tag it if you want to and then delete if you dont want it…).
Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

So for myself, I set up my bookmarklet on my iPhone and iPad to easily add bookmarks to the Pinboard.in account. The instructions are in the web site’s HELP page.
Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in
Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

And when I visit a page I want to bookmark, I click on the bookmarklet and it will pop up the “ADD” stuff for me to add and tag:
Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

So how many bookmarks I have now, after I imported and then cleaned up :).. About 1000 left but growing with each day 🙂
Managing Bookmarks with Pinboard.in

Hope you will also join and use this service. I think the owner is doing a great job with this service and running it. Support good ideas ! 🙂

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