Tag: Pinboard

Pinboard Switches from One-Time to Annual Fee

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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.

Information Overload – Trying to Reorganize A Workflow

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In January of 2011, I wrote a story on the subject of Organizing Your Workflow with Instapaper and Pinboard. This was in response to the announcement of the impending closure of Xmarks(which later did not close), and the announcement that Delicious was shutting down. This had brought me to Pinboard.

Pinboard-Home

Pinboard is currently available at a rate of just over $10 for a lifetime subscription, plus $25/yr for an Archival Account.

At the time, I used Instapaper, a Read It Later service, as a holding pen for stories, which I later archived in Pinboard. In April of 2011, I announced the move to Read It Later(now Pocket). There were many good reasons for this, however, the refresh from Read It Later to Pocket made service lean more toward the visual.

Which brings me to May of 2012, where I once again pondered the subject, right after I read Clay Johnson’s book, the Information Diet. At the time, I vowed to get my information overload under control.

Here we are, March of 2013, and…it is worse. I finally declared bankruptcy on Pocket(Formerly Read it Later). I exported everything I was most definitely NOT Reading Later, and sent it to Pinboard. There is some duplication there that has to be cleaned up, but now I have 25,000 bookmarks to go through and prune. The archive of which takes up 25GB.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this isn’t working, but I’m changing plans once again. I need a plan that allows me to reference old material I have in the archive, while keeping track of more relevant material. For now, I’ll be living in Pinboard, without benefit of a secondary service. But I am open to suggestions.

Will update you as this develops.

 

 

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Mixing up the Workflow and Avoiding Overload

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This is not the first time we’ve talked about our workflow. It has evolved over the years. Our workflow currently consists of a Read It Laterservice and a

If This Then That. com

long-term bookmark archiving service.

When we started, the Read it Later service was Instapaper. We adopted Pinboard as the long-term archiving service. It is nice to know all the reference material we might use is stored for later use.

We later moved to Read It Later, which has recently rebranded as Pocket. The problem is we have 11,000+ bookmarks in Pinboard, and near 3000 in Pocket. Just reading all the stuff we need to learn to keep informed is a challenge.

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Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet discusses this problem, and makes a large amount of suggestions on the subject. He refers to the idea as infoveganism. This is not to say we totally agree with Mr. Johnson, but we see the point that information overload is a problem.

Last year, Ars Technical posted an opinion piece titled, “Why keeping up with RSS is poisonous to productivity, sanity.” Perhaps RSS is but so is the alternative, social media. Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, etc are all sources of often repeating information. Who can keep up with all that?

The secret to a good workflow is to wisely choose your information flows, keep your inbox empty, and try to schedule spring cleaning for your accounts the same as anything else.

As part of that, we’re trying out ifttt.com, which allows you to tie together parts of the Internet. Using If This Then That logic, you can tie things together. For example, since Pocket support in Pinboard doesn’t allow bookmarks to be added when read, ifttt.com can add this functionality. There are dozens of suggested tieups between sites that otherwise would not be possible.

It is time to liquidate the Pocket account, get up to date, prune the Reader accounts again, prune the Twitter followers…

What is your workflow?

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Switching from Instapaper to ReadItLater

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The concept of a Read It Later service is not new to our workflow. Back in October of 2010, we discussed moving our workflow to Instapaper. Then, our storage expanded to Pinboard, and we discussed integrating Pinboard and Instapaper into a writing and reading workflow.

However, the developer of Instapaper is very iOS-centric. He released an official iPad and iPhone app, and many of his updates are paired with an app update. We do like the product, but we decided to consider the competition when ReadItLater released an official Android app(Market Link), which is available currently at 99 cents. We had initially looked at ReadItLater and moved on, but things have changed.

The Android app offers an exclusive feature not available for any other platform app. Instant Push Sync, which ensures new items instantly download and are available on the phone, even if the phone is offline. Also on the Android side of things, there is a ReadItLater plugin for Dolphin Browser.

Read It Later also has a Firefox extension with a feature we were hunting for(unfortunately not also available for Chrome), which is Save All Tabs for Later. It also offers offline reading, Google Reader integration, etc.You can mark items as read directly from the browser.  Overall, it is much more tightly integrated into the browser experience.

Pinboard also supports the same import from ReadItLater it does from Instapaper, which means that end of my workflow(the archive) is unchanged.

Read It Later also has a beta paid feature called Digest. This turns your Read It Later stories into an online magazine format, and automatically sorts them into topics. The magazine format is very popular right now.

It does lack the auto-send to Kindle function that Instapaper offered, but this can still be reproduced using Calibre. It lacks folders, but supports tagging(which can accomplish the same thing)

If your priorities are clean formatting of long-form text content and integrated portability to an eReader, you may lean toward Instapaper. If you do your reading with your browser or mobile device and want to keep up with content-rich pages with lots of images or videos, Read It Later may be more suited.

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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.