A Tour of Pinboard

Pinboard is a bookmarking site for people who want a fast, reliable way to keep track of the things they find online.

If you're a delicious user, you may want to take a look at our comparison of the two services.

Here's what a Pinboard user page looks like (you can click through):

Your user page shows you a list of your bookmarks and notes, a tag list or tag cloud, a search box, and various links for filtering and organizing your bookmark stream.

We'll explain all those features in more detail below.

Bookmarks

A bookmark consists of a URL, title, description, and tags:

Everything except the URL is optional. The description can be as long as you like. Any URLs in the description will be automatically hyperlinked.

Clicking the star to the left of the bookmark title will mark the bookmark to appear on your starred page.

This is useful when you need to quickly assemble a list of bookmarks scattered across your account, in order to perform a bulk operation (like adding a tag).

The checked box to the right of the title leads to an archived copy of the bookmarked page. This feature is only available to users who purchase an archival account ($25/year).

You can also see the date you saved the bookmark (clicking on this leads to a detail page) as well as the number of other users who have publicly saved the same URL.

The saved by others link leads to a list of tags and descriptions for the URL from other Pinboard users.

If the bookmark came from outside the site, you'll also see a special tag showing its source:


Privacy

You can mark bookmarks as private so other users won't be able to see them. Private bookmarks have a darker background:

You can configure your account to mark all your bookmarks as private by default.

Pinboard also offers private tags. These are tags that only you can see:

To mark a tag as private, put a period in front of it. Like private bookmarks, private tags have a darker background.

If you import existing bookmarks from delicious, Pinboard will detect and honor the privacy settings.

Read Later

Sometimes you want to save things to look at later, without filling out a bookmark form. Pinboard offers a special read later status for these bookmarks, along with a one-click bookmarklet that silently adds pages to your unread list.

Unread bookmarks have their titles in orange, and are not visible to other users:

Clicking on the 'mark as read' link turns the bookmark into a regular one. You can also configure Pinboard to automatically clear the 'toread' status once you've clicked a link.

Saving Bookmarks

You add bookmarks to Pinboard with browser bookmarklets, little snippets of JavaScript you can drag up to your browser bar:

Clicking on a bookmarklet will take you to a popup form where you can add a title, description and tags:

If you don't like popups, you can configure Pinboard to open this form in the same browser window instead.

The 'save bookmark' form will auto-suggest tags for many websites, and if you like will auto-complete tags as you type.

You can also create bookmarks by email. Send the link to your special Pinboard address, along with optional tags and description, and the site will automatically add it to your collection.

This can be useful when using a mobile device like an iPhone or Blackberry.

Importing Bookmarks

Pinboard is set up to work with a number of outside sites and formats. You can import all your existing bookmarks from Delicious, Google Bookmarks, Diigo, ma.gnolia, Firefox, Safari, and many other sources by following the instructions on the howto page.

You can also configure Pinboard to automatically mirror public bookmarks from your accounts on Delicious, Instapaper, Read It Later, and Google Reader.

Pinboard will check the services every hour or so and automatically add new bookmarks to your collection.

If you're a Twitter user, you can set up Pinboard to collect and archive your tweets, and save every URL in your main Twitter stream or your Twitter favorites as a bookmark.

The body of the tweet will become the bookmark description, and any #hashtags will be added as regular tags.

Pinboard remembers where each bookmark came from, so it's easy to view a list of your bookmarks filtered by source.

Using Notes

Sometimes you want to bookmark a snippet of text, or write a note to yourself for later. Pinboard makes it easy to do this with notes. A note is a snippet of text of any length:

When you enter a note in the text field, Pinboard automatically creates a web page for it and adds it to your bookmarks:

Notes are a useful way to bookmark hard-to-link articles, to-do lists, or any other kind of text you might have floating around in need of a permanent home.

Managing Your Bookmarks

Many of our users have large bookmark collections, so we try to provide multiple ways to filter and organize links.

You can edit your bookmarks in place on any page, using the inline editor:

You can bulk edit any number of bookmarks in one operation by clicking the 'edit' link at the top of any bookmark page:

On your user page, you can choose to view all your bookmarks, or filter them by category:

You can also limit what you see to a specific tag:

Or to a tag intersection:

Or to a specific source:

Each view of your data has its own corresponding RSS feed.

Quick Edit

Every bookmark page has an 'organize' link to a quick-edit interface.

This shows an edit form in the top third of the page, and the bookmarked site below:

Any changes you make to the form are automatically saved as you navigate.

This can be a handy way to quickly categorize bookmarks you haven't read, go through your unread list, or do some bookmark gardening.

API and Outside Services

Pinboard offers a full API modeled on version 1 of the Delicious API. The API lets you do everything programatically that you can do through the web interface.

Thanks to the API, Pinboard works with a variety of outside services, including Reeder, Delibar, and Pukka. If there is an API feature that you need to make your app work, just ask!

Feeds, Badges, and Widgets

Pinboard provides RSS feeds for every bookmark page. Look for the orange 'RSS" link at the top of the page, or the RSS icon in your browser address bar.

Feeds for pages with private content have a secret token in the URL, to safeguard your privacy.

These secret URLs let you use your feeds in aggregators like Google Reader that do not support RSS authentication.

We also offer javascript badges for use in your blog template, along with a WordPress plugin.

Pinboard for Mobile Devices

Pinboard offers a custom version of the site at m.pinboard.in, designed to look good on mobile devices such as the iPhone.:

Pinboard also supports bookmarking by email, for situations when it's easier to email a bookmark to yourself than to enter it by hand.

Finding New Links

Although we call Pinboard an 'antisocial' site, many of our users make their bookmarks public. The site's public pages offer several ways to find interesting new links:

The recent page shows you the newest links on the site.

The popular page has a list of the day's most frequently bookmarked URLs and tags.

The global tag pages will show you all the bookmarks for a specific tag.

Bookmarks from other users include a special copy to mine link that will automatically add the link to your 'unread' list, along with a 'via:' tag so you can remember which user you nicked it from.

You can also subscribe to individual users' bookmarks on your network page. The page will even suggest users to you based on your shared public history.

Of course, any bookmarks you mark 'private' will not appear on these parts of the site.

Archival Accounts

In addition to the free features listed above, Pinboard offers a bookmark archiving service for an annual fee of $25. The site will crawl and store a copy of every bookmark in your account, and display a special icon you can click to see the cached copy:

If the page you bookmarked goes offline, you'll still be able to see the archived copy indefinitely.

We'll also show you which of your bookmarks have dead links, or give errors.

Development and Support

Pinboard is a small site owned and operated by its developers. We make an effort to be easy to reach and interact with. If you have an idea, or need help, you can bring it up directly with the development team and be sure of a prompt response.

Many of the best features on the site started as user suggestions posted on the discussion forum or sent to us via email.

If we can't accomodate a feature request, we'll work with you to find a good workaround. And if something goes wrong, you can contact us directly through Twitter, IRC, or regular email.

Our top priorities are safeguarding your data and keeping the site fast and useful. We're always glad to answer questions and hear advice from our users.

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Of course, the best way to get to know the site is to try it out. So sign up for an account today!


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