Moving From Pinboard To Linkding : Easy And Quick

I have been planning on moving from Pinboard to Linkding for a while. It took me a while due to plain laziness but finally I made the move. It took all of 15 mins to do so.

Background of my Pinboard

Pinboard has been my bookmark manager for a long time.

In fact, I have about 2,232 bookmarks in Pinboard.

My first bookmark apparently was in 2010. Some 15 years ago 🙂

Pinboard used to be free but in recent years, they have started to charge. It cost about USD22 per year now.

I have no issue with paying for it. It is a stable service and nothing has gone wrong at all. On my iPhone and iPad, I also used an app called “Pins for Pinboard” to keep the bookmarks in an app.

But then, as readers of this blog knows, self hosting has stuck me in my Synology world. I have now quite a few Self Host apps in my Synology DS1520+ (such as Jellyfin, Calibre, Plex Music Library and Uptime Kuma). And they are all easily to access from the internet through my Tailscale.

And so instead of paying the annual subscription, I decided to research for a self hosted bookmark manager and I came upon Linkding.

Linkding

Linkding is a a self-hosted bookmark manager designed be to be minimal, fast, and easy to set up. And it looks very similar to Pinboard.

And it fits all my needs including having third party apps to support it.

Setting up Linkding on Portainer

Of course, I use the amazing Marius Hosting web site for instructions on how to set it up. The link is here. However, as I am using Tailscale to access the app from outside my network, I skip Step 1 to Step 9 and basically set it up from Step 10 onwards.

The code is

version: '3.9'
services:
  linkding:
    container_name: Linkding
    image: sissbruecker/linkding:latest
    ports:
      - 9495:9090
    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/linkding:/etc/linkding/data
    environment:
       LD_SUPERUSER_NAME: <my user name>
       LD_SUPERUSER_PASSWORD: <my user password>
    restart: on-failure:5

You can see that Linkding is running on Port 9495.

Once it is set up easily in Portainer, I can log on to Linkding on Port 9495. You will use the user name and user password in the Docker Compose file above to log on.

And welcome to Linkding 🙂

Moving from Pinboard to Linkding : The bookmarks migration

The main thing about a bookmark manager is…. bookmarks. I have 2,232 of them. So in my moving from Pinboard to Linkding, that’s the main task.

Done in five mins.

Go to Pinboard. Go to Settings and then BACKUP and then export your bookmarks as HTML file.

It will look like this:

Then in your newly running Linkding app, go to Settings > General and scroll all the way to the botton to find the IMPORT part.

In the CHOOSE FILE field, choose the file you downloaded from Pinboard.

Uploading the File from Pinboard to Linkding

And upload it. Couple of seconds later (I am not exaggerating), it is completed. Except for 1 which I never bothered to find out which one 🙂

And when you go back to the main page of the Linkding, all your bookmarks are there !

Simple. Easy. Fast.

Using Bookmarklet in Linkding

Linkding has official bookmark extensions for Firefox and Chrome. But not for Safari, which is my browser of choice in MacBook Air, iPad and iPhone.

So you will be using a bookmarklet instead. Which is fine as that’s what I have been using in Pinboard.

The bookmarklet is an alternative, cross-browser way to quickly add new bookmarks without opening the linkding application first. Here’s how it works:

Drag the bookmarklet below into your browsers bookmark bar / toolbar
Open the website that you want to bookmark
Click the bookmarklet in your browsers toolbar
linkding opens in a new window or tab and allows you to add a bookmark for the site
After saving the bookmark the linkding window closes and you are back on your website

And that’s what I did 🙂

And so when you visit a web page that you want to bookmark, click on the Bookmarklet in the bookmark bar and it will be captured into Linkding (Obviously you must be logged on to your self-hosted instance of Linkding).

For example, in this case, I visited DBS web page and wanted to add it as a bookmark in Linkding and so clicking on the bookmarklet, it brings up the Linkding page, ready for me to put in the TAGS too and then to save it.

In iPhone and iPad Safari, you will visit the web page and then click on the bookmark icon at the bottom of Safari to bring up the Safari bookmarks and then choose the Bookmarklet.

The iPhone and iPad apps I use for Linkding

Now it is really optional to have an iPhone or iPad app to use with Linkding. In the past, I used the “Pins for Pinboard” app and it works with the Share Sheet of the iPhone and iPad and makes it so much easier to Pin bookmarks.

Unfortunately, the app I am using for Linkding does not seemed to work for Share Sheet.

But it has a iPhone and iPad version so that’s pretty good.

The app is called LinkThing.

Once you downloaded it and open it, you will enter your instance URL (with the port number. So for me that would be Tailscale IP address + 9040). And also the API of your Linkding instance (found in Settings…).