Saving and sharing links

I like to save interesting links in a ‘bookmark manager’. The main benefit is that I can close tabs and stop wondering if I should read something now or how I’ll find it later.

Since 2009 (15 years!) I’ve had a Pinboard account. I’ve saved over 10,000 bookmarks there. I regularly use it to find things I’ve read or seen and build knowledge on topics I’m interested in.

Nearly all my bookmarks have tags to help search topics. Something I hope to do soon is to go through some of my more popular tags, such as ‘writing’ and ‘effective’, and distil the knowledge from over a decade of link saving!

Currently I’m rebooting where and how I share on the web. The goal is to choose software and services that give me the best chance of keeping that information online at a consistent web address. At the moment that consists of three places:

• www.keybits.net - this website for posts and letters

• links.keybits.net - links / bookmarks

• @keybits.net - short posts (currently on bsky.app, ‘@keybits.net’ is part of my AT Protocol identifier so it’s not tied to a specific service provider - more on Bluesky and atproto soon!)

For links.keybits.net I’m using linkding an open-source bookmark manager (currently hosted on the excellent PikaPods service). As of now I’ll be using this instead of Pinboard because Maciej told me to:

What does the future hold for Pinboard? Death! The bus that one day comes for us all! The skeletal, icy hand on an unprepared shoulder! Pain, a flash of light, then numbing darkness. So back up your bookmarks.

linkding has a couple of nice features that made me choose it over the many alternatives:

• optionally share links as public - I love finding links on other people’s sites. Simon Willison and Jeremy Keith are two people who consistently inspire me with the links they share. With linkding people can browse what I share.

• SQLite database - a single file that will be easily queried even if the web application stops working.

I contemplated importing all my Pinboard bookmarks, but have decided to start with a clean slate. I can still access Pinboard for older links if want to look something up (and I do of course have a backup)!

Happy link saving and sharing!