Pinboard Turns Three

Today is the third anniversary of the site's public debut. Amusingly, I see some icons on the TechCrunch comment thread that launched Pinboard as a for-profit endeavor are already starting to break. This is why we need archiving!

Here are some site stats for this year, compared with one and two years ago:

As you can see, most metrics have doubled except for downtime, which stayed the same, and the number of active users*, which increased by half.

I am very happy with these numbers! But I'd love to see downtime get back down into the single digits next year (especially if that digit is 0).

New features this year included tag subscriptions, visual highlighting (so you can skip things you've already bookmarked), support for time zones, the option to alphabetize your tags, public profiles, user search, import from Google Reader, a Russian-language version of the site, and alphabetical sorting on user+tag pages.

I spent a lot of time this year in various utility closets, both literally and figuratively, working on site infrastructure. There are certain blog posts (like "How I Lost All Your Passwords And Data") that I would find tedious to write, and which you would probably not enjoy reading. Anxious to entertain, I do what I can to avoid writing them. My efforts this year fell into five categories:

1. Security. Making the site harder to break into, and less interesting to poke around in. This included code review, changing how cookie authentication works, defaulting to SSL wherever possible, storing passwords with bcrypt rather than 'salted hashes', and making the admin console a separate app rather than a set of superpowers attached to my Pinboard account. I have also changed the way backups are stored so that a malicious user with root access cannot delete everything without coming over to my house.

2. Peformance. A big part of the reason for moving to custom hardware this year was to keep Pinboard fast. Speed has always been the site's secret killer feature (shhh!), because I think high latency is one of the greatest sins a bookmarking site can commit.

3. Automation. The measure of automation is how many keys you have to press to bring the site back to normal after someone hits the reset button on the main server. This number is still not zero, but it's much closer to zero than it used to be.

4. Monitoring. Pretty graphs!

5. Resilience. It should be possible for any one big thing (network connection, data center, power supply, motherboard) to die without users noticing it. The site is not there yet, but at least I can see that promised land.

Other things that happened this year: Fandom showed up to the site in October and quickly settled in (after collaborating on the mother of all feature requests). In February, I gave two talks at the Personal Archiving conference here in San Francisco. And I learned a lot of stuff about the nuts and bolts of web hosting, which I have tried to summarize in blog posts here.

This was also the year bookmarking got trendy again, with Pinterest taking off, Delicious reinventing itself, and a steady trickle of newcomers coming to disrupt and revolutionize the social bookmarking space (I try to keep an up-to-date list on the resources page). All will crumble into dust!

I've been a computer guy for a long time, but this project is first time I've worked on something that actually helps people outside of computerland in their everyday lives. That's the best thing about running Pinboard, and it makes me look forward to many more years at the helm. Thank you for the support and encouragement you've given me along the way!

* An active user is defined as someone who has saved at least one bookmark in the past thirty days.

—maciej on July 09, 2012