A Cavalcade of Updates

January 19, 2025

Some Pinboard updates as we careen forward into the New Year:

I. Return of Public Pages

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!

—maciej on January 19, 2025

Pinboard is Eleven

July 09, 2020

Pinboard is eleven years old today! Every year when I don't forget I try to publish the same stats:

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

—maciej on July 09, 2020

I can't stop winning!

July 09, 2019

Pinboard is ten years old! I launched the site in July 9, 2009 from a small kitchen in Botoșani, Romania. My very first support email angrily demanded a refund, setting the tone for the next ten years.

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).

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

—maciej on July 09, 2019

Eight Years of Victory

July 09, 2017

Pinboard is eight!

Here's what's happened so far:

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

—maciej on July 09, 2017

Pinboard Acquires Delicious

June 01, 2017

Pinboard has acquired Delicious. Here’s what you need to know:

If you’re a Pinboard user, nothing will change. Sad!

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.

—maciej on June 01, 2017

Benjamin Button Reviews The New MacBook Pro

October 31, 2016

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.

—maciej on October 31, 2016