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Tag: Bookmarks

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Pinboard Switches from One-Time to Annual Fee

Bookmarking site Pinboard has announced that effective January 1st, 2015, it will discontinue the one-time signup fee and instead offer a $11/year plan, as well as the existing $25/year archival plan.

However, anyone who is an existing member, or who signs up before January 1st, will be grandfathered in.

As someone who has 32,000 bookmarks in Pinboard of articles I found of interest, I would recommend the service. It is flexible enough to be whatever you want it to be.

For me, as an archival customer, it is a record of every online source I read and found of interest that I know will be there(as it is archived on the Pinboard server). I can search that for any article I remember reading.

Other people use it in other ways. It can be social, it can be a Read It Later service…I used to use a Read It Later service, when what I really wanted was an archive.

So, if you are interested, give it a try before the price goes up.

Published on December 15, 2014
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Organize your Workflow with Pinboard and Instapaper

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One of the hardest things to do in writing a blog is keeping up on all the developing news and keeping track of reference materials that might be needed for a story. Research is very important, and for the longest time, we neglected keeping our materials organized to the point we ended up with thousands of bookmarks inside our browser and we could never find anything.

Then, Xmarks, our bookmark syncing service announced it was going to shut down(It didn’t), and caused us to rethink how we were doing things. We started with Instapaper. Instapaper is a holding queue for things we have yet to read. It isn’t designed for long-term storage.

Which is why we added Pinboard. The price for joining Pinboard is, at time of post, $9.20 and increases a fraction of a cent with each user. Pinboard is a low-noise bookmarking site, billed as social bookmarking for introverts. It offers the opportunity to store all of your bookmarks and tag them with descriptive terms. It can import links from a Twitter feed, Instapaper, Google Reader, etc. automatically.

Due to a recent boost in popularity caused by news of the imminent shutdown of Delicious, Pinboard is bursting with new users, and new features are planned. Support for multiple Twitter accounts is coming, as well as a Firefox plugin, downloadable archives for backup, tag recommendations, etc.

So, in our current workflow, an item we read quickly and want to keep for the future goes directly to Pinboard. A more timely item or something we want to read in more detail goes to Instapaper rather than sitting in the browser in a tab and eating up active memory. While Instapaper has a Pinboard feature to send Starred Items to Pinboard, and Pinboard has a feature to import from your Instapaper feed, we are hoping for a feature in Instapaper to send archived items directly to Pinboard, as opposed to Starred ones. Other people want a way to integrate Pinboard’s built-in Read Later tag with Instapaper.

So, when we need something, we can search our Pinboard archive for the information. We’re not the only one who uses the combination of the two to keep organized. One blogger called it “Organizational Bliss(Almost)” The benefits of Instapaper for organizing information you want to read and Pinboard for information you want to archive are great. Why not give them a shot? The developers are committed to continuing to improve these services for us.

We even have access to them on Android devices. There are multiple Instapaper clients for Android, all unofficial, but we recommend Instafetch. Instafetch is free, but there is a paid service component to it. There is only one full fledged Pinboard client, Pindroid, which is a port of a Delicious client that is slowly coming into its own.

Of course, our next organization project is finding more hours in the day to actually write things. Anyone have a website for that?

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Published on January 20, 2011
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LastPass Acquires Xmarks

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The title says it all. LastPass, which is a cross-platform password manager, has acquired Xmarks, a cross platform bookmark, tab, history, and password sync. It seems a match made in heaven. The two businesses seem to align perfectly.

Xmarks will join Lastpass‘s Freemium model. The browser plugin and most of what users are used to will remain, but new features will be available, including an iPhone and Android app. Those features will be part of the $12 a year premium package. You can get both premium services bundled for a $20 a year package.

The two services will continue to require separate downloads and will be administered through two distinct extensions and websites, although there are plans to integrate them in the future.

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Published on December 5, 2010
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Xmarks and Bloglines will Live

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Cross-Browser Bookmark and Password Syncing Service Xmarks will remain alive, it seems. The company is in the final stages of a sale to an as-yet unrevealed new owner who will keep the product alive. The new service will have a free and a premium component, and details will be forthcoming. So those of you who have already switched, you can come back.

Another product, Bloglines, a once-popular RSS aggregator, also slated to shutdown, has been sold to MerchantCircle. MerchantCircle provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns. The free service will remain, and new services will grow around the technology. The Clippings feature will be discontinued, but all other features will remain.

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Published on November 8, 2010
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Xmarks to Shut Down

Image representing Xmarks as depicted in Crunc...
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XMarks is a service that offers cross-platform and cross-browser bookmark, password, and tab syncing. We’ve been using this service since it was Foxmarks, many moons ago. However, now, after four years, they have announced the discontinuing of service in January of 2010.

We’re not sure what we’ll do, as we tend to switch between Chromium and Firefox, using Xmarks to keep the two in sync. At this point, we suppose we’ll have to abandon one or the other. Firefox offers Firefox Sync. Chrome/Chromium offers sync to your Google account built in. Tough decision. As tough as choosing a browser.

Todd Agulnick, Co-Founder and CEO in a farewell blog post, thanked users, investors, and colleagues for their loyalty and signed off in true geek fashion, quoting Douglas Adams, “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.”

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Published on September 27, 2010
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