Tag: delicious

Organize your Workflow with Pinboard and Instapaper

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Image representing Pinboard as depicted in Cru...
Image via CrunchBase

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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When The Cloud Fails You – Delicious and More

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Image representing delicious as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

This year, many services we have grown used to have started to announce shutdowns. Most notably, a news story reporting that Yahoo was shutting down Delicious caused many to scramble to find other services.

It turned out Yahoo is looking to sell Delicious, not to merely discontinue it. But it does mean that unless someone wishes to acquire the service, it will be shut down eventually. Delicious is a social bookmarking site.

Pinboard, for example, after the news, gained many new users, and gained seven million bookmarks with it, more than they’d collected over the lifetime of their service.

But that isn’t quite the point. The point is to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Cloud storage is great. We all use it, and love it. But be prepared. Periodically export your data and keep a copy elsewhere. There are also services. Paid services are also available, such as Backupify.

Backupify has an impressive collection of backup tools for GMail, Twitter, Facebook, etc. You may not wish to pay. But remember, you should have at least two backups, and at least one of them should be offsite…not in the same place you keep the primary storage. More on this to come.