For a while I’ve been playing around with Yahoo’s popular bookmarking service Delicious. I never really liked the UI/UX of the service so I gave up on it fairly quickly.
After discovering Pinboard though, I decided to give it a go and see how it compared to Delicious. Overall, I really like what it does, but discovered that a different way of using it than what was probably intended by it’s creator.
Here’s what I initially did and what I discovered:
- My first step was importing a bunch of my own bookmarks from Google Chrome
- Realized that I didn’t feel like duplicating bookmarks I already sync with my Google account in Pinboard as well.
- Started from a clean-slate and deleted all my bookmarks in Pinboard.
I then figured out another cool and useful way of using Pinboard; a scratchpad for links!
Here’s my workflow:
- Come across a cool link either from landing on a webpage (on either my laptop or iPhone) or from various social networking services (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr).
- Bookmark it in Pinboard
- Sweet! Now I have a collection of awesome links I can then later look at when I have time.
I find that this is A) a great way of sharing links a later date and B) great for collecting useful links that I may want to link to in a blog post.
I don’t know if anyone else uses social bookmarking services like Pinboard in this way (I imagine some do), but I thought I would share my experience anyways as others may find it useful.