For the last few months Pinboard has been beset by bot traffic, most of it originating in China. Bots are nothing new, but in the past it was fairly easy to block them by IP address, or user agent string, or some other identifiable feature. The recent crawling is different. It is aggressive, it impersonates normal browser use, and it is spread across tens of thousands of IP addresses, so that normal strategies (like throttling by IP address) don’t work. Nor is it confined to Pinboard—I’ve seen reports from people who run all kinds of sites that the bot problem has been getting vexing.

The problem with bots is that some pages on the site, particularly user+tag pages, are somewhat expensive to generate. To keep bot traffic from bringing down Pinboard entirely, I had to put a number of public pages behind a login. This not only goes against the design of the site (public stuff should be public!), but understandably upset a number of users who rely on the site as a way of sharing links with others.

Last week I added a simple CAPTCHA to the site, so that users without a Pinboard account can once again see public content. If the bots start to outsmart the CAPTCHA, I’ll try other measures. But for now, things seem to be holding.

II. Gift Accounts

You can now give Pinboard gift accounts, at a nice discount to the normal price. Since we’re all a bunch of unsocialized shut-ins, I’ve had a number of people ask if they can give themselves a gift account, to which I have had to answer, no. That is not how gifts work.

You give gifts to other people, not yourself! Pinboard does not believe in self-care.

But I encourage you to share your love of the site by gifting subscriptions to your friends, colleagues, and large extended family.

III. Twitter and Bluesky

People (including myself) loved hooking up Pinboard to archive links in their Twitter feed. But then Twitter (now X) changed the pricing policy on their API to make the cost of integration absolutely prohibitive.

Since then, a number of people have asked if I will add a way to connect Pinboard to Bluesky. I'm open to the idea, but before I do it, I would like to solicit ideas about how such a feature should work.

With the old Twitter integration, you could connect up to three Twitter accounts, and optionally add any links found in your Twitter favorites to your Pinboard bookmark list. Is this how Bluesky integration should work too? Or are there other approaches people would find more useful?

Please send feedback and suggestions support@pinboard.in. Since I don't really use Bluesky, I don't have a good sense of how people are using it, and how that might differ from old Twitter. Please let me know! ]]> https://blog.pinboard.in/2020/07/pinboard_is_eleven/ Thu, 09 Jul 2020 00:00:00 UTC Pinboard is eleven years old today! Every year when I don't forget I try to publish the same stats:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	2020
bookmarks	3.5	27	53	76	97	122	148	173		224	244
tags (M)	11	76	135	178	212	251	291	291		405	426
active users (K)	2.8	16	23	23	24	25	24	29		21	19
archives (T)	0.2	3.0	5.9	8.8	14.2	20.9	24.8	31.8		57	82
URLs (M)	2.5	16	32	48	63	82	104	126		173	192
revenue (K)	117	178	181	175	193	160	234	259	253	222	212
funding (M)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
acquisitions								1

This has been an interesting year! When the pandemic came and left us all housebound, I used it as an excuse to do some remedial work I’d been dreading—moving Pinboard onto modern versions of PHP and MySQL. Things had gotten to the point where I couldn’t even run a bug-for-bug identical copy of the site on a modern laptop, and the servers themselves were overdue for system upgrades.

Much of the core code on the site dated back to 2009-2010 and was written by Past Me, a vindictive, inscrutable nemesis who devoted his life to sabotaging Present Me.

Past Me laying his snares in 2009.

Doing this on a live system is like performing kidney transplants on a playing mariachi band. The best case is that no one notices a change in the music; you chloroform the players one at a time and try to keep a steady hand while the band plays on. The worst case scenario is that the music stops and there is no way to unfix what you broke, just an angry mob. It is very scary.

But I got it done! It helped in this process that I was in Japan, since I could do most work at night while my US/European customers slept or wept into their phones or whatever it is people do at night nowadays.

The site is now on a 2020 foundation (specifically, it’s on PHP 7 and a current MySQL), and with everything less brittle I can start making bigger changes. One of those is to make the site look okay on mobile phones, now that I’m finally convinced they aren’t a fad. You can see the beginnings of this reworking on the about page and in other corners of the site.

Another is to finish the new API. The current one was designed to be a drop-in replacement for the old Delicious API and lacks important features, like any way to say “show me stuff that has changed since timestamp X”, or interact with Pinboard features that weren’t present in Delicious.

Another analogy I’d use for this kind of upgrade work is clearing a disused garden. In the process you may unearth remarkable stuff—an old wagon wheel, a Roman urn—hiding among the weeds. But it’s mostly interesting to you, and not to the people who are waiting in line at your vegetable stand.

In my case, I found the skeletons of dead features (remember placemarks?) as well as spectral ghosts of defunct services like Google Reader, Readability, and of course Delicious itself, which now slumbers peacefully while I try to figure out a way to bring it up without dealing with the waves of automated spam still pointed at the site. But I’ll save that for another post.

Now that I have a fresher memory of how the site works, and am not so afraid of touching anything, I look forward to doing some long-delayed feature development.

Meanwhile, thanks to everyone for using the site for another year! Not everyone gets to be around long enough to have to do major upgrades, and I am grateful to be in that position, thanks to all of you.

Previous anniversary posts:

• I can't stop winning! (10 years)
• Eight Years of Victory
• Pinboard Turns Seven
• Pinboard Turns Six
• Pinboard Is Four Years Old
• Pinboard Turns Three
• Two Years of Pinboard
• One Year of Pinboard

The Internet back then was different. HTTPS was a luxury good. You could buy products and services with Bitcoin. Things in the tech industry hadn't consolidated down to an oligopoly—Yahoo was still a going concern, as was AOL and LiveJournal. The 'big 3' in tech were HP, IBM, and Motorola, with Microsoft the only software company in the top 10. Pillows were fluffier. Food tasted better.

Now that a decade has passed, I thought I would have some Yoda-like business wisdom to impart, but I don't. It feels just like last year. The journey of 10,000 steps begins with 9,999 steps!

My grandpa sometimes said "you have to help your fate along," and I always liked this worldview very much, for the way it bolted a work ethic onto fatalism. Things happen, but you can always take credit for tenacity.

A one-person business is an exercise in long-term anxiety management, so I would say if you are already an anxious person, go ahead and start a business. You're not going to feel any worse. You've already got the main skill set of staying up and worrying, so you might as well make some money.

Running an online service solo puts one in the coffin corner between the Dunning Kruger effect and impostor syndrome. On some days you feel the correct but paralyzing sense that you are in way over your head. On other days, you'll feel like you're surfing on waves of liquid competence, doing flips, until you destroy something important.

In between the two is a zone of narrow, focused productivity that I hope one day to find.

Every year I post stats, except last year, when I forgot. (I will update the 2018 stats in the table below when I find them).

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019
bookmarks	3.5	27	53	76	97	122	148	173		224
tags (M)	11	76	135	178	212	251	291	291		405
active users (K)	2.8	16	23	23	24	25	24	29		21
archives (T)	0.2	3.0	5.9	8.8	14.2	20.9	24.8	31.8		57
URLs (M)	2.5	16	32	48	63	82	104	126		173
revenue (K)	117	178	181	175	193	160	234	259	253	222
funding (M)
acquisitions								1

The gist of it is, there are more bookmarks, more URLs, more of everything except users. That is because I spent all of 2017 doing tech organizing, and then all of 2018 fundraising for the Congressional elections, and customers grew irate. Now I am trying to win them back.

What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.

On this happy day, there are three people I would like to especially thank:

• Joshua Schachter, for giving me the moral blessing to clone Delicious while it was still a going concern, and for contributing invaluable ideas (like the URL schema and pricing model).

• Peter Gadjokov, who co-founded the site with me, came up with the name, and helped me through the insanity of December 2010.

• And Britta Gustafson, who introduced me to fandom and showed me how they had created an entire world of their own on Delicious.

Not coincidentally, all three of these people are from the earliest days of Delicious, and I am happy that the community they created in 2003 can in some way live on in the very different internet of 2019, biding its time until things can be fun again. I am grateful to them all, and grateful to the people who use this website, hopefully for many decades to come.

Previous anniversary posts:

• Eight Years of Victory
• Pinboard Turns Seven
• Pinboard Turns Six
• Pinboard Is Four Years Old
• Pinboard Turns Three
• Two Years of Pinboard
• One Year of Pinboard

Pinboard is eight!

Here's what's happened so far:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016	2017
bookmarks	3.5	27	53	76	97	122	148	173
tags (M)	11	76	135	178	212	251	291	291
active users (K)	2.8	16	23	23	24	25	24	29
archives (T)	0.2	3.0	5.9	8.8	14.2	20.9	24.8	31.8
URLs (M)	2.5	16	32	48	63	82	104	126
revenue (K)	117	178	181	175	193	160	234	259
funding (M)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0
acquisitions	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	1

The big story this year was last month's surprise acquisition of Pinboard's long-time nemesis Delicious. This illustrates the importance of always having a backup nemesis, an area where Pinboard leads the industry.

But it's also been a rough year for Pinboard users! In November I began traveling extensively in support of Tech Solidarity, an attempt to mobilize tech workers after the disastrous US election.

All the travel meant I sometimes ignored support emails for weeks at a time. In the last couple of months, I've taken a bit of a reverse sabbatical to try to stabilize the site, make it easier for me to monitor and run, and catch up with a backlog of very, very, very irate messages.

I also baked this delicious pie:

As every year, I'd like to thank all Pinboard users, old and new, for their support and their custom. I know there are lots of rival bookmarking services out there.

I will consume them, one by one, like I consumed the pie.

Previous anniversary posts:

• Pinboard Turns Seven
• Pinboard Turns Six
• Pinboard Is Four Years Old
• Pinboard Turns Three
• Two Years of Pinboard
• One Year of Pinboard

If you’re a Delicious user, you will have to find another place to save your bookmarks. The site will stay online. but on June 15, I will put Delicious into read-only mode. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after that date, or use the API.

Users will have an opportunity to migrate their bookmarks to a Pinboard account, which costs $11/year. Those who prefer to bookmark elsewhere will be able to export their data once I fix the export link, which was disabled some months ago for peformance reasons.

Please note that there is no time pressure for moving off Delicious. You won't be able to save new bookmarks after June 15, but everything else will continue to work, or break in familiar ways.

As for the ultimate fate of the site, I'll have more to say about that soon. Delicious has over a billion bookmarks and is a fascinating piece of web history. Even Yahoo, for whom mismanagement is usually effortless, had to work hard to keep Delicious down. I bought it in part so it wouldn’t disappear from the web.

This is the fifth time Delicious has been sold. Founded in 2003, the site received funding from Union Square Ventures in 2005, and sold to Yahoo later that year for somewhere between $15-$30M.

In December of 2010, Yahoo announced it was ‘sunsetting’ Delicious, an adventure I wrote about at length. The site was sold to the YouTube founders in 2011. They subsequently sold it to Science, Inc. in 2014. Science sold it to Delicious Media in 2016, and last month Delicious Media sold it to me.

Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard.]]> https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/10/benjamin_button_reviews_the_new_macbook_pro/ Mon, 31 Oct 2016 08:39:48 UTC The new MacBook Pro shows that Apple is finally becoming serious about developers.

Gone is the gimmicky TouchBar, gone are the four USB-C ports that forced power users to carry a suitcase full of dongles. In their place we get a cornucopia of developer-friendly ports: two USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 2 ports, a redesigned power connector, and a long-awaited HDMI port.

Photographers will rejoice at the surprising and welcome addition of an SDXC card reader, a sign that Apple might be thinking seriously about photography.

The new MagSafe connector is a bit of Apple design genius. The charging cord stays seated securely, but pops right off if you yank on it. No more worries about destroying your $2k laptop just by accidentally kicking a cord.

What hasn't changed: Apple has kept the beautiful Retina display, and storage and memory are the same as before. The new machines will be slightly thicker (to accomodate the USB ports) and 200 grams heavier, but it's not clear how this will affect battery life.

Interestingly, Apple has removed the fingerprint reader and its associated dedicated chip, perhaps assuming that developers would not comfortable with a machine they don't fully control.

The most obvious change is the redesigned keyboard. Removing the Touchbar creates room for a row of physical function buttons and, in a nice touch, an escape key. This isn't a perfect solution: the function buttons map to a confusing series of actions that can send windows flying around the screen with an errant keystroke, and the new physical off switch is too close to the backspace key. But it is certainly a huge step forward, and it will be interesting to see how software developers take advantage of this clever new feature.

Everything about the new machine seems designed for typists. The trackpad has been made smaller, so you're less likely to brush against it with your palm. The keys themselves are much more comfortable to type on, with improved key travel, a softer feel, and more satisfying tactile feedback. You no longer feel like you're tapping on the glass surface of an iPad. And not having a TouchBar means no longer having to look down at your hands all the time.

Despite the many improvements, Apple is actually dropping the price on its flagship 15" MacBook Pro by $400, another sign that they're serious about winning over developers.

The release is an encouraging sign of life at Apple, whose products have not seen significant changes since the company introduced a separate operating system for its laptops in 2019. There's even speculation that Apple may refresh its antiquated Mac Pro and desktop macs, neither of which have been updated since their release in 2022.

Rumors are also swirling that the company will add a headphone jack to its already popular iPhone. The announcement could come as early as this month.]]> https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/09/new_directions_in_bloat/ Thu, 15 Sep 2016 10:51:09 UTC Next month I'll be giving a talk at Smashing Conf in Barcelona on "New Directions in Web Bloat". This talk will be a follow-up to one I gave last year on the Website Obesity Crisis.

I need your help! Please send me examples of the flabbiest, most ridiculous, puffed-up, overbuilt sites you've come across in 2016, particularly if they use new advertising formats, or demonstrate a fresh kind of design pathology.

I'm especially interested in examples of the following:

• New advertising formats you've noticed in the past few months

• Particularly egregious examples of sites that use megabytes of cruft to display a tiny amount of text. (Note: everybody emailed me the one-word NYT article already.)

• Interesting examples of ad-blocker detection, or even better, ad-blocker-detection-blocker-detection.

• Magnificently gratuitous use of video.

• Examples of the Inner Platform Effect, particularly with multiple levels of nesting.

• Bloated articles about bloat.

For maximum ha, I prefer well-known sites to obscure examples. But I'm not picky. If it makes you weep quiet tears of rage, I want to hear about it! Let me know also if you mind being credited by name in my talk.

Thank you!

Heh, don't worry, that's just the whiskey talking. Pinboard is seven years old today!

Here is the traditional set of statistics:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
bookmarks	3.5	27	53	76	97	122	148
tags (M)	11	76	135	178	212	251	291
active users (K)	2.8	16	23	23	24	25	24
terabytes archived	0.2	3.0	5.9	8.8	14.2	20.9	24.8
unique URLs (M)	2.5	16	32	48	63	82	104
revenue (K)	117	178	181	175	193	160	234
funding (K)	0	0	0	0	0	0	0

I've added revenue this year because I'm no longer afraid of competitors, and I'd like to encourage people who are considering doing their own one- or zero-person business. The site costs something like $17K/year to run, so you can make a good living at this artisanal SaaS stuff.

As you can see, most everything has been steady year-to-year for a while now. Revenue dropped a bit in 2015 (as I moved to an annual subscription system), then picked up substantially this year as the first wave of subscription renewals came due, and people had the option for renewing for multiple years.

I did almost nothing on the site this year except keep it running. Mainly I spent the year fomenting and profiting from online drama. But lately a kind of coding mood has descended on me, and I hope I can spend some time later in the summer figuring out how on earth the site works, and making some long-overdue improvements.

Thanks to everyone who has supported the site, whether you've just signed up, or are one of the mythical group of beta testers who started bookmarking with me back in 2009. You have helped me make the transition from unemployed to unemployable, and given me something worthwhile to work on in between running my mouth off.

Previous anniversary posts:

Pinboard Turns Six

Pinboard Is Four Years Old

Pinboard Turns Three

Two Years of Pinboard

One Year of Pinboard ]]> https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/03/my_heroic_and_lazy_stand_against_ifttt/ Mon, 28 Mar 2016 16:14:02 UTC Update April 3:

IFTTT will maintain Pinboard support through at least the end of 2016. While this date is not specified in their full statement, I have confirmed it with the CEO and am pleased to announce it here.

I am hopeful that we will find a way to extend that deadline indefinitely, but if we don't, I'll try to provide ample lead time.

I do not know whether this extension applies only to Pinboard, or to the handful of other "legacy" services that predate the IFTTT developer platform.

I'm grateful to IFTTT for listening to our shared users, and finding a way to extend the life of a service many people have come to rely on.

Original post:

Imagine if your sewer pipe started demanding that you make major changes in your diet.

Now imagine that it got a lawyer and started asking you to sign things.

You would feel surprised.

This is the position I find myself in today with IFTTT, a form of Internet plumbing that has been connecting peacably to my backend for the past five years, but which has recently started sending scary emails.

If you've never heard of it, If-This-Then-That is a service that lets you connect websites together, so that things that happen in one place automatically trigger some regrettable action someplace else. For example, you might write an IFTTT ‘recipe’ that tweets anything you post on Facebook, because you are a monster.

A lot of Pinboard people use IFTTT. Yesterday, they received the following form letter:

Dear username,

We're working on a new IFTTT platform for developers that makes building Channels and Recipes a breeze.

Recently, we've worked with our partners to migrate to the improved platform, but some have chosen not to do so. Unfortunately, the Pinboard Channel did not migrate to the new platform and will be removed on April 4th.

Pinboard is one of our favorite services and we're all sad to see it go. We hope down the road it may be back.

Stay tuned to the latest Channels launching on IFTTT!

— The IFTTT Team

Because many of you rely on IFTTT, and because this email makes it sound like I'm the asshole, I feel I should explain myself.

In a nutshell:

1. IFTTT wants me to do their job for them for free

2. They have really squirrely terms of service

1. Working for Free

A service like IFTTT writes "shim code" that makes it possible to connect online services together like Legos. Everything slots into everything else. This is thankless, detailed work (like developing TurboTax or Dropbox) that when done right, creates a lot of value.

IFTTT has already written all this shim code. They did it when they were small and had no money, so it's difficult to believe they have to throw it away now that they have lots of staff and thirty million dollars.

Instead, sites that want to work with IFTTT will have to implement a private API that can change without warning.

This is a perfectly reasonable business decision. It is always smart to make other people do all the work.

However, cutting out sites that you have supported for years because they refuse to work for free is not very friendly to your oldest and most loyal users. And claiming that it's the other party's fault that you're discontinuing service is a bit of a dick move.

I am all for glue services, big and small. But it's better for the web that they connect to stable, documented, public APIs, rather than custom private ones.

And if you do want me to write a custom API for you, pay me lots of money.

2. Squirrely Terms of Service

The developer terms of service don't seem to be available by a public URL, so I will quote the bits that stung me. I invite IFTTT lawyers to send me a takedown notice, because that will be the funniest part of this fracas so far.

To begin with, IFTTT wants me to promise never to compete with them:

2.You shall not (and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to), directly or indirectly: [...] (xii) "use the Developer Tool or Service in conjunction with a product or service that competes with products or services offered by IFTTT. You hereby make all assignments necessary to accomplish the foregoing.”

Pinboard is in some ways already a direct competitor to IFTTT. The site offers built-in Twitter integration, analogous to IFTTT’s twitter->Pinboard recipe. I don’t know what rights I would be assigning here, but this is not the way I want to find out.

Next, they make a weird claim about owning not just their API and service, but the content that flows through it:

3. Ownership. IFTTT shall own all right, title, and interest (and all related moral rights and intellectual property rights) in and to the Developer Tool, Service, and Content.

They require that I do custom development work for them, for free, on demand:

11. Compatibility. Each Licensee Channel must maintain 100% compatibility with the Developer Tool and the Service including changes provided to you by IFTTT, which shall be implemented in each Channel promptly thereafter.

And they assert the right to patent any clever ideas I have while doing that free work for them, even though I hate software patents:

12. Patent License. Licensee hereby grants IFTTT a nonexclusive, sublicensable, perpetual, fully-paid, worldwide license to fully exercise and exploit all patent rights with respect to improvements or extensions created by or for Licensee to the API

Finally, they reserve the right to transfer this agreement to anyone at all, without my consent:

17.This Agreement is personal to Licensee and may not be assigned or transferred for any reason [...]. IFTTT expressly reserves the right to assign this Agreement and to delegate any of its obligations hereunder.

I say nuts to all that.

I'm sorry your IFTTT/Pinboard recipes are going to stop working.

It's entirely IFTTT's decision to drop support for Pinboard (along with a bunch of other sites). They are the ones who are going to flip the switch on working code on April 4, and they could just as easily flip the switch back on (or even write an IFTTT recipe that does it for them). Weigh their claims about Pinboard being a beloved service accordingly.

For users left stranded, I recommend taking a look at Zapier or Botize, which offer a similar service, or at one of the dozens of new sites that will spring up next week to capture the market that IFTTT is foolishly abandoning.]]> https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/01/leave_of_absence/ Thu, 07 Jan 2016 14:39:09 UTC I'm going to be offline from February 1 to March 9. It's not going to be the cleansing, restorative, Internet cleanse kind of offline, but the old-fashioned kind, where no one can possibly reach me if there's an emergency.

May God help you all.

To keep the site from ruin, Nat Torkington has kindly agreed to babysit while I'm gone. If you don't know Nat, this is a little bit like getting Julia Child to agree to run your hot dog stand. You are in good hands.

As Nat was the person who gave me my first big break in the world of computers, running Pinboard will serve as a fitting penance.

If you have any urgent requests, problems or concerns, I highly recommend you wait until February 1 and bring a little excitement into Nat's life.

For some reason, no one is willing to take over the Pinboard twitter account, so the support@pinboard.in address will be the place to go.]]> https://blog.pinboard.in/2015/07/pinboard_turns_six/ Thu, 09 Jul 2015 11:15:49 UTC Today is Pinboard's sixth birthday as an online service, but of course the roots of the site go much deeper. My grandfather started Pinboard all the way back in 1931, when he was a young agronomy student in need of some way to help keep track of cuttings. What began as a simple system of shelves and apple saplings had soon expanded to encompass the books in his comfortable study.

In 1968, like so much of Polish culture, Pinboard went underground, in this case literally, as a warren of tubes and cables that could be quickly disconnected if a local political officer came snooping by. The rat's nest of hidden cabling below the floor would inspire me years later when it came time to wire up my own servers.

By 1980 Pinboard was an elaborate system of strings and pulleys cross-referencing material across five bookshelves and a greenhouse. One of my earliest memories is tugging on one of the threads and watching a cloud of white bookmarks fly out from between the onion-skin pages of a thick tome. I got a sound drubbing for it. But how we laughed!

With changing times came changing technology. Visits home turned into long evenings keying cards into a ZX Spectrum, lulled into inattention by the soft hiss of the cassette tapes that the data would save onto (or the dreaded crinkling sound that meant the tape had gotten wrapped up in a spool).

When it came time for me to take over Pinboard, I vowed to continue my grandfather's committment to Eastern European craftsmanship and traditional Polish customer service. But then I got bored and thought, "eh, just put it online and see what happens." That was six years ago today.

Here is the traditional set of statistics:

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014	2015
bookmarks	3.5	27	53	76	97	122
tags (M)	11	76	135	178	212	251
active users (K)	2.8	16	23	23	24	25
bytes archived (T)	0.2	3.0	5.9	8.8	14.2	20.9
unique URLs (M)	2.5	16	32	48	63	82

As you can see, growth in data stored has been fairly linear and the number of active users has crept up to the 25K mark. I changed the business model of the site in January from a one-time signup fee to a recurring fee, but has this affected income? It doesn't feel like it. Possibly it has. I really need to look into it.

I am a terrible businessman.

Thanks for another year entrusting me with your precious data, and giving me the genuinely pleasant feeling that comes from running a useful project. Please don't forget to make backups! ]]>