So with so much dependency on all this, I knew I needed to save this stuff. If Pinboard disappeared tomorrow, I need a way to access this stuff I’m saving. Maciej Ceglowski, developer of Pinboard, gives you the option at any time to export all your items as HTML, XML, or JSON. Data portability is good. However, there’s no automated option to do this.

So I came up with a way to automate everything. This is an idiot’s guide to do it, since I’m by no means a pro at this stuff - I just poke around until I can make it work.

A Pinboard redesign built off of the styles started by Josh Pigford, I’m providing a bare stylesheet which works with StyleBot on Chrome and User CSS on Safari. The Chrome version can be installed straight from Stylebot​.me. Stylebot​.me also has a userscript version which could be used with Greasemonkey, but my styles don’t seem to translate well to Firefox, yet. I’ll work on that when I have time.

Here’s the raw stylesheet if you want to grab it and use it in User CSS or somewhere else: pinboard.css. I’m not going to tell you it’s bulletproof, but feel free to send in obvious bugs. Also feel free to pick it up and run with it, just link the “credit chain” back and make sure to show us what you did!

How to use The Hit List with Alfred.

A number of people asked about the technical aspects of the great Delicious exodus of 2010, and I've finally had some time to write it up. Note that times on all the graphs are UTC.

On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called "sunset". The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit.

A smarter bookmarklet for Pinboard.in; wraps selected text in

tags, keeps variables out of the global scope, supports filling tags from rel="tag" markup in the page, and titles from hAtom entry titles.

The remarkable amount of technical leverage available is allowing personal projects to compete on a world class level. I have in mind single-developer apps like Instapaper and Minecraft. This ability for single developers to build an entire product is recent and I think we’re going to see all kinds of exciting things come of it.