I’ll no longer be adding new links/bookmarks to my Pinboard account but will continue to add them to my own site.
If you currently follow the RSS feed of links at Pinboard, you’ll need to subscribe to a new RSS feed at gyford.com instead.
If you currently follow my RSS feed of Writing, Photos and Links combined, you don’t need to change anything.
If you don’t follow a feed but visit my Pinboard page, you’ll need to change your habit to visit www.gyford.com/phil/links/ instead.
Let me know if anything doesn’t seem right.
§ Why? I’ve been thinking of stopping using Pinboard for some time and I’m due to pay for another year’s subscription. It’s not a lot of money, and I’m fine with paying for services, but if I was going to stop now seemed like the right time.
Why switch? Partly because Pinboard has barely changed in years, if not decades. In a world where services and sites continually change and add features I don’t need, this is often a good thing. But in Pinboard’s case it’s been frustrating that in 2025 its phone-size form for adding a URL is still not responsive.
(Having said that, now I visit it again it seems a little better; maybe it’s changed in the past few days? Verrry small type though.)
I’ve also had some issues in the past with the owner of Pinboard. I can’t recall the exact details of their political or other thoughts now, and don’t plan to look for them, but the site fell into my mental bucket of “services to reluctantly not recommend” a while back.
Mental note: I need a bigger bucket.
[Update (2025-02-12): This post, which I thought of as a hasty update to the handful of people who followed my links, was posted to Hacker News for some reason. Yes, I should have provided evidence for the above judgment had I thought more people would read it. As ever, use your own judgment for these things.]
But also, a while back I wrote a lot of code to mirror my Pinboard links onto my own site. This seemed (and sometimes still seems) like a good idea in general: Post things to a third-party site, perhaps with some social features, but also mirror everything to a place that you control. The best of both worlds!
However, given I don’t use any of the minimal social elements of Pinboard – like viewing my “Network” page – and don’t know many people who actively use the site any more, I wasn’t getting any social benefit from using it. (I can also follow the individual RSS feeds of those who do use it.)
So keeping my Pinboard page going and mirroring it to my own site, something that was once “the best of both worlds”, is today, “now I have two problems”. Why pay for a service, and have the little mental overhead of it existing, when I’ve duplicated it on my own site?
So I might as well change what was the mirror of the data – my own site – into the original source, the place that I update with links, and leave the Pinboard page as a relic.
How my Pinboard page looks now
