1. Getting Started
  2. Privacy
  3. Import Bookmarks
  4. Export Bookmarks
  5. RSS and syndication
  6. Bookmark by Email
  7. API
  8. Mobile Site
  9. Downloads


Getting Started

If you're new to the site, take a look at the tour of Pinboard to get familiar with our features.

Pinboard uses bookmarklets - little javascript links that you drag up to your browser toolbar - for bookmarking. There are four kinds of bookmarklets to choose from:

The popup bookmarklet opens a little form window when you want to bookmark a page. It's the fastest way to add a bookmark.

The same page bookmarklet will load the save bookmark form in the same window as the page, with no popup. It redirects back to the page afterwards.

The my pinboard bookmarklet will take you to your bookmarks.

read later will add a URL to your list of "to read" items without badgering you for tags or descriptions.

The oldest bookmarklet will take you to your oldest unread item.

The random bookmarklet will take you to a random unread item.

You can drag these bookmarklets up to your toolbar and start using them right away. Feel free to rename them by right-clicking and choosing 'properties' or 'edit name'.

Privacy

Bookmarks on Pinboard can be public or private. Only you can see your private bookmarks. They have a grey box around them.

You can set bookmarks as public or private using the checkbox on the add and edit forms. You can also have all your bookmarks be private by default by turning on the appropriate setting on the settings page.

Pinboard also offers private tags. These work the same way as regular tags, but are only visible to you. Any tag beginning with a dot (.) is considered private. Private tags also show up in a grey box.

Importing Bookmarks

Pinboard lets you import your existing bookmarks from delicious, Safari, Firefox, and many other sources.

To get your bookmarks out of del.icio.us, go to Settings -> Export/Backup Bookmarks and hit the 'Export' button.

You can then upload the resulting file to Pinboard on the settings page.

To get your bookmarks out of Firefox, go to the "Bookmarks" menu, select "Organize bookmarks", then click on the icon that looks like a star and choose "Export HTML...".

You can then upload this file into Pinboard the same way you would for del.icio.us bookmarks.

Exporting your bookmarks

Pinboard uses the same export format as del.icio.us. To retrieve your bookmarks, use the following URL:

http://username:password@pinboard.in/export/

Be sure to replace "username" and "password" with the appropriate values.

RSS Feeds and Syndication

Pinboard offers RSS feeds for most pages on the site. The format for public RSS feeds is:

http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/t:tag
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:tag
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/recent/

We also offer feeds for individual user accounts. These contain an additional secret token, to preserve users' privacy:

http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/private/
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/unread/
http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/network/

You can find the RSS feed URL for any page by clicking on the orange "RSS" link, or by clicking on the RSS icon in your browser's toolbar.

Don't see a feed you need? Let us know and we'll cook it up for you.

Bookmark by Email

You can configure Pinboard to let you add bookmarks to your account by email. This can be useful if you are using a mobile device (like an iPhone) where it's easier to email a bookmark than to submit it with JavaScript.

The email format is simple. The subject line is the bookmark title, the first line of the email is the URL, followed by an optional description and optional line of tags. Here's a sample email:

To: secret-email-address@pinboard.in
Subject: This year's potato harvest

http://www.wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=166262
Another fine Wisconsin festival I want to attend.
wisconsin t fair potato ha

There are two special one-letter tag shortcuts. Including the single letter p in the tags line will make your bookmark private, while t will mark it as unread.

Posting by email is turned off by default. To enable it, go to the settings page and click the appropriate checkbox. Once you've turned the feature on, you'll see the email address you can use to post bookmarks.

Be careful not to share this email address; anyone who has it will be able to post to your account.

API

Pinboard offers a full API, modeled on v1 of the del.icio.us API, which you can find documented on their website.

Simply replace the endpoint in the examples with https://api.pinboard.in/.

Mobile

There's a version of Pinboard optimized for mobile devices available at http://m.pinboard.in/

Downloads

You can download the most recent 25 bookmarks on any page for offline viewing. First, make sure you have 'enable downloads' turned on on your settings page. You'll see a 'download' link at the top of your bookmarks.

Click the link, and in a few minutes, you'll be able to download a folder with a full local copy of those bookmarks, along with a table of contents in HTML format you can open in a browser.

This feature is useful for times when you want to read your bookmarks without an Internet connection.