Publishing my bookmarks
I started publishing my bookmarks. Doing this has been a fun way of micro-blogging; I now can look back at what I spend most of my time doing (obsessively browsing the internet).
How it works
I currently use Pinboard1 to store my bookmarks. I use the tagging feature on Pinboard to mark what I’d like to publish; anything with the tag “publish” gets included on my public page.
This blog is hosted on Blot. Blot turns a folder of markdown on Dropbox into a blog.
To connect Pinboard and Blot, I wrote a tiny script that fetches my bookmarks from Pinboard’s API, generates Markdown, and writes that to my Dropbox. Blot picks up the change and updates the page.
It was fun writing this script, and surprisingly easy to update Dropbox programmatically. Feel free to use or modify this script for your own use-case. I’m excited to think of other ways to connect external APIs, Dropbox, and Blot.
I’m sure that I’m the only one who cares about publishing my own bookmarks, but that’s ok2. Working on this blog has inspired me to write more. Potentially, I may start updating my newsletter with links and other content more often. I’m excited to see where this goes, and it’s also okay if the answer is nowhere.
Pinboard has its quirks and is certainly imperfect but it’s served me well over the years. At some point I think I may look for a replacement (parts of it feel unmaintained and break frequently) but I’m a big fan of its archive feature, which saves the contents of every page you bookmark.↩
I’m definitely inspired by “But nobody will read my blog” (Why You Should Start A Blog Right Now, Alexey Guzey)↩