Getting Started

If you're new to the site, take a look at the tour of Pinboard to get familiar with the site's features.

You may also want to look at the list of useful Pinboard resources.

If you get stuck, send me email or find me on Twitter.

Saving Bookmarks

Pinboard uses bookmarklets for bookmarking. Bookmarklets are little javascript links that live in the bookmarks toolbar of your browser.

Here's the list of bookmarklets we offer:

  • popup opens a little form window when you want to bookmark a page. It's the fastest way to add a bookmark.
  • popup with tags is a slightly larger bookmarklet that shows a clickable tag cloud.
  • same page will load the save bookmark form in the same window as the page, with no popup. It redirects back to the page afterwards.
  • my pinboard will take you to your bookmarks.
  • read later will add a URL to your list of "to read" items without badgering you for tags or descriptions.

There's also a couple of shortcuts to your bookmarks:

  • oldest will take you to your oldest unread item.
  • random will take you to a random unread item.

If you use Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera, you can drag these links up to your bookmarks toolbar. You can rename them to whatever you like by right-clicking and choosing 'edit name'.

If you're using Internet Explorer, dragging won't work. Right-click on the bookmarklet instead, and select 'add to Favorites' at the prompt.

For iPad

The iPad makes it somewhat difficult to add bookmarklets. Follow these instructions to get a 'Save to Pinboard' bookmarklet working on your iPad.

  1. Add this page as a bookmark (click on the box with the arrow in it next to the Safari address bar).
  2. Click the open book icon, select 'edit', and rename the bookmark to something like 'Save to Pinboard'
  3. Select the text below:
  4. Edit the bookmark you just made and the text you copied into the URL field.
  5. Save your changes and test the bookmarklet by saving this page to Pinboard.

Privacy

Bookmarks on Pinboard can be public or private. Only you can see your private bookmarks. They have a grey box around them.

You can set bookmarks as public or private using the checkbox on the add and edit forms. You can also have all your bookmarks be private by default by turning on the appropriate setting on the settings page.

Pinboard also offers private tags. These work the same way as regular tags, but are only visible to you. Any tag beginning with a dot (.) is considered private. Private tags also show up in a grey box.

Privacy Lock

Privacy lock is a special feature that makes the site look nicer to users with all-private bookmarks, and adds some safeguards to make sure you don't accidentally post public bookmarks to your account.

Privacy lock has the following effects:

  • You'll see a little lock icon at the top of the page, reminding you the feature is on:

  • All bookmarks added to your account will be marked private, with no exceptions.
  • You will no longer see edit controls to mark bookmarks as public.
  • Private bookmarks will have a white background, so the site looks nicer.
  • Your bundles will not be visible to other users.
  • Your public profile (if you have one) will be hidden

You can turn privacy lock off or on the privacy tab of your settings page.

Tags

Tags are the main way to organize and label your bookmarks in Pinboard. Tags can be of any length, and can contain any character except for whitespace and comma.

Tags are not case-sensitive, but they will display the way you entered them.

By default, tags display in the order they were entered, but you can ask to have them displayed alphabetically in your user settings.

Your tags appear next to your bookmarks on your homepage. You can choose to view them as a cloud (this shows about 200 of your most-frequently used tags), or as a list. In list mode, you can decide whether to show all tags, or ones that have appeared a minimum number of times, by clicking on the number links.

Bundles

Bundles are named collections of tags. They are most useful for people with large numbers of tags that they wish to group by category.

A bundle lets you see all the bookmarks tagged with one or more tags in the bundle.

For example, if you had tags apple, orange and banana, you might put them in a bundle called fruit.

Bundles are public by default. You can make them private by prepending a dot to the name, like so: .secret bundle.

Importing Bookmarks

Pinboard lets you import your existing bookmarks from most anywhere. Importing bookmarks will preserve all your tags, and anything marked private will stay private.

First, you'll need to export your bookmarks into a file that Pinboard can read. Here's how to export bookmarks from some common places:

  • Google Reader
    1. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner of the page.
    2. Select the Import/Export tab.
    3. Choose either items you have starred or items you have shared and click the Reader JSON link (the rightmost column)
  • Delicious.com
    1. Go to your settings page
    2. Select export/back up links from the right sidebar.
    3. Click the Export button (use the default settings).
  • Firefox
    1. Select Show All Bookmarks from the Bookmarks menu.
    2. A new window called Library will open.
    3. Click on the icon that looks like a star and choose 'Backup...'.
  • Diigo: go to Tools -> Export Bookmarks and choose to export in "Delicious Format".
  • Safari: choose File -> Export Bookmarks.
  • Chrome:
    1. Go to the Bookmarks menu and choose Bookmark Manager
    2. Click the Organize link in the blue navigation bar
    3. select Export Bookmarks to HTML File...

Once you've exported your bookmarks, go to the settings page on Pinboard, choose the 'import tab', and upload the file there.

Your bookmarks should import within no more than five minutes. If there are duplicates in your import file, Pinboard will ignore them (so it's safe to import the same thing multiple times).

Exporting your bookmarks

You can export your bookmarks in XML, JSON, or Netscape Bookmarks format from the export page. You can also export using the API, which is more convenient to automate.

Feeds and Syndication

Most pages on the site have an associated RSS feed. You can find the feed for any page by clicking on the orange RSS icon near the navigation bar. The URL patterns for public RSS feeds look like this:

https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:tag/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/recent/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/popular/

You can also get feeds in other formats by replacing /rss/ in the URL with /json/, /text/ or /ical/.

Feeds are served with the appropriate content-type for their format. You can override this by including a 'textify' argument in the query string:

https://feeds.pinboard.in/ical/popular/?textify=1

This will return a feed in ical format served with a text/plain content type, which is useful for debugging.

You can also pass a count parameter to control how many results come back. The default feed length is 50 items, and the maximum is 400:

https://feeds.pinboard.in/text/popular/?count=15

You can filter feeds by up to three tags:

https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/t:tag1/t:tag2/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/t:tag1/t:tag2/t:tag3/

https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/t:tag1/t:tag2/

And you can filter user feeds by source:

https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:username/from:twitter/

Pages that require authentication have private feeds. These URLs have an additional secret token, so you can view your private and unread bookmarks in a feed reader:

https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/private/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/unread/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/untagged/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/starred/
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/secret:xxxx/u:username/network/

If you share the secret token, anyone will be able to see your private bookmarks, so take care.

All pinboard feeds are available by https if you'd like added security.

Don't see a feed you need? Let me know and I'll try to cook it up for you.

Bookmark by Email

You can configure Pinboard to let you add bookmarks to your account by email. This can be useful if you are using a mobile device (like an iPhone) where it's easier to email a bookmark than to submit it with JavaScript.

The email format is simple. The subject line is the bookmark title, the first line of the email is the URL, followed by an optional description and optional line of tags. Here's a sample email:

To: [email protected]
Subject: This year's potato harvest

https://www.wisbusiness.com/index.iml?Article=166262
Another fine Wisconsin festival I want to attend.
wisconsin t fair potato ha

There are two special one-letter tag shortcuts. Including the single letter p in the tags line will make your bookmark private, while t will mark it as unread.

Posting by email is turned off by default. To enable it, go to the settings page and click the appropriate checkbox. Once you've turned the feature on, you'll see the email address you can use to post bookmarks.

Be careful not to share this email address; anyone who has it will be able to post to your account.

API

Pinboard offers a full API, modeled on v1 of the del.icio.us API.

Most software that uses the delicious API can be modified to work for Pinboard simply by replacing the endpoint with https://api.pinboard.in/v1/.

See our API Documentation for all the details.

Mobile

A Pinboard optimized for mobile devices is available at https://m.pinboard.in/

There are also numerous third-party mobile apps available for iPhone, iPad, Android, and many other devices. These are listed on our resources page.