Useful Tools: Pinboard

This is the first in a series of posts I'll be doing on this blog detailing some software or web services that I use. I'll try to end each post with two examples of things I've used the software for recently. Pinboard is an online bookmarking service. I save all the articles I read online there with a handy bookmarklet, and everything I read in Instapaper and via twitter also gets saved there. Even better, if you upgrade to a premium subscription, Pinboard's servers will make an archive copy of the site so even if it is taken offline, you'll still have a copy of the site. And before you say that other services do it better, read this.

It's handy for sharing collated link collections with people and it's useful just as an archive of everything you've been reading.

Two recent uses of Pinboard:

  1. I keep a rolling list of all the reviews and comments on my recent edited book, Poetry of the Taliban. You can see this here. These kinds of lists are great for sharing with other people.
  2. The other day I remembered I had read something online, but couldn't quite remember where, so I searched within my Pinboard archive (including the text of all the websites I'd visited and read articles from in the past two weeks), finding the article within seconds.