Show HN: My pinboard-backed link blog

[itsmequinn]

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.

[michaelbuckbee]

This is interesting, I'm also using Pinboard (with some custom ruby code for caching) to power my fairly popular Bootstrap links page [1].

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-...

[itsmequinn]

That's cool. I hadn't thought of using a tag for this. As I said below in another reply, I just don't fill in the extended text or I mark an article as private in order to keep it out of the feed. A tag seems like it might be better though. Thanks for the comment.

[danielna]

Sort of off topic, but I wish there was a better tool for pinboard user discovery. I love the self-selection bias of pinboard in that it's highly tech and the popular links are right up my HN/nerdy alley, but I'm starting to really enjoy the "network" view with the 6 or so people I follow. Trying to parse the list of user profiles for interesting folks at random is way too time consuming.

Anyway, I''m following you now, so there's the super tangential tieback. And nice work!

[itsmequinn]

Thanks a lot for your feedback.

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.

[kijin]

A lot of recent entries from your Pinboard timeline seem to be missing, including your most recent bookmark. Are you sure the list is being updated every 15 minutes?

[itsmequinn]

Yes, I should have mentioned that only articles that are shared (public) and that have extended description text are processed by my script. That way I don't wind up with any articles that have no body content and just a title and tags.

[kijin]

I see. I was wondering if you were filtering your bookmarks by specific tags, but excluding description-less bookmarks also sounds like a good idea.

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.

[itsmequinn]

I'm not, but I'll definitely check it out. Since this application is so simple, it only requires one curl request and I just use the http authentication method. Working on this small project (and the comments here on HN) have definitely opened my eyes to greater possibilities though, so I'm sure I'll have need for a php client in the future.

[idleworx]

That's fairly cool. Is there an actual pinboard.in API available these days, or did you just hack something together? I haven't checked pinboard.in in a while.

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).

[michaelbuckbee]

Pinboard has an API [1] and maybe even better for your uses they tried really hard to make it compatible with the Delicious API, so adding support shouldn't be much of an issue.

1 - http://pinboard.in/api/

[webwanderings]

Pardon but I don't see a point in paying a service to gather/amass links which you don't own in the first place. So I have no idea why service like pinboard exist which charges you to gather other people's URLs.

A tumbler blog is sufficient enough in letting you gather links, quotes, videos, etc, etc, and it is free and fast.

[kijin]

Don't think of it as simply gathering URLs, but as a personal information manager that you can (1) keep private if you want to; (2) curate to your heart's desire; (3) put up on the "cloud" without having to worry about the owner selling your data to third parties, because you're a paying customer; and (4) download your entire collection in a widely supported format and move it elsewhere on a moment's notice. I don't see Tumblr supporting these features anytime soon.

If you pay a little more, Pinboard also gives you a snapshot of all the pages you ever bookmarked.

[webwanderings]

You didn't get the irony. The mere idea that you are paying to keep other people' stuff, is silly.

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.

[kijin]

Google is not in the bookmarking business because it is not profitable enough for them.

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.

[idleworx]

Links are not something you own, they are things you access. Obviously I don't 'own' the link news.ycombinator.com it's just a link.

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 ...

[tealtan]

I do a similar thing on my site, filtered by a couple tags I find the most interesting:

http://tanmade.com/reading/publishing.html

[ambiate]

Michael, aside from the interesting link blog, your nyu.edu links in the design section are dead. Otherwise, all is working well in Chrome64 25.0.1364.97.

[itsmequinn]

Thank you very much for the polite feedback. This is my first submission and I was expecting worse. I fixed the issue you pointed out.