Hacker News Reader

Comment by wowtip | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea and the philosophy behind this site.

What bothers me and keeps me from using it is the fact that it seems to be a one man show.

I could really use this, but my bookmarks have too much time invested to be put on a service I cannot trust completely to stay around.

What would happen to the bookmark collection if main dev is hit by a bus (heaven forbid) or just lose interest? Could not find anything on this in FAQ.

TOS mentions "If the site ceases operation, you will receive an opportunity to download your stored data in a format suitable for import into other bookmarking services."

But the concept seems well thought out, can a current user confirm my worries are unfounded?

View on HN

Well, first off, being a larger operation certainly doesn't prevent shutdown. Although it may add some peace of mind, there's a risk in trusting any third-party service provider.

Secondly, you can easily make use of the API to backup your bookmarks [1]. A simple cronjob can make a daily repo of everything, just in case.

I've been using Pinboard for about two years now, and I love it. It's simple, easy to use, and does what I want--and nothing more.

1: https://pinboard.in/api/

Exactly, Pinboard has a pretty good API, so you can handle the backups yourself without too much trouble.

I came across a post [1] with a backup script. It refers to another link [2] that shows you can just use a simple curl and get all of your data.

[1] http://alexwlchan.net/2013/03/pinboard-backups/

[2] http://supersoju.com/blog/2013/04/01/pinboard-backups-in-1-l...

Thanks guys, that makes sense. The 1 line curl backup looks nifty.

Going to look into this a bit more. Should improve on my current local bookmarks + external backup setup, without involving Google or any other data mining cloud service.

I have a daily cronned download of all my Pinboard data as an XML export. It's trivial - just curl or wget https://username:password@api.pinboard.in/v1/posts/all. Done.

The data ends up in my regular backup, so I have historical data and can examine deltas if I wish.

A good portable bookmark format, or an open API, accessible from web browsers could really help (me).

I bookmark liberally, from different web browsers on different devices. Sadly I still haven't gotten round to aggregated that data.

If I could dump the last days bookmarks to file quickly and easily, I could probably mock something useful up.

No guarantees anywhere on the internet.

I've been with pinboard two years, and I feel much more confident that pinboard will be around a long time, than when I think about Google (for example) and its reputation of shutting things down.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com