Pinboard and Micro.blog—RSS
I’m a huge fan of Pinboard.in for online bookmarking. Maciej is an awesome developer, has a strong business model1 (so he has no reason to sell your data), and delivered an open API. You can link your account to Twitter2, Instapaper, and Pocket; and also set your account to be completely private.3 There’s even the fun story of the Great Delicious Exodus of 2010.
It also provides an easy way to start link blogging on Micro.blog via its RSS Feeds. If you want to send everything (I don’t recommend this) and have a public account, it’s as easy as adding https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/4 to your feeds in the same manner as WordPress. I’d recommend choosing a tag, like to_blog,5 and creating a feed just for that: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:to_blog. If you want to have more options, you can use up to three tags: http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/t:tag1/t:tag2/t:tag3/.
Warning: I do not recommend using private feeds. @smokey let me know that future Micro.blog features may reveal them. If you’ve set up your account to be private, creating the feed is slightly more complicated. You have to add your authentication token6 to the address: https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username. I would definitely use https here and if someone gets a hold of your token, they will be able to see all your bookmarks via RSS. Moreover, they will be able to add, change, and delete them through the API.7
One other thing to note, if you use RSS, you will not have any control over the appearance of your link posts. They will all have a title and thus link to your blog for the full content. Also, any markup or tagmojis will have to be entered upon the bookmark’s creation. I am working on an AppleScript that will enable manipulation of bookmarks before posting to Micro.blog; I will share and explain it in a post when I’m done. If you’d like to try to hack about a script on your own, I’m basing it off this earlier script.
Ping me via @Bruce on Micro.blog if you have any questions.
Update 2018-06-07: Added warning about private feeds.
- He posts yearly updates on how Pinboard is doing. ↩
- Backing up all your tweets. ↩
- It’s the Anti-Social bookmarking site. ↩
- The examples on the howto page use http, but https works as well. ↩
- Tags cannot have spaces, so I use underscores instead. ↩
- Which can be found on the the password tab of your account’s settings. ↩
- They won’t be able to make any changes to your account though. That requires signing into the website with your password. ↩
@Bruce Cool stuff.
@Bruce thanks!
@aclaman @frostedechoes Glad you are finding it useful! Note the update about not recommending private feeds. I’m researching some alternatives.