TL;DR: my online bookmarks are now on Pinboard.

I don’t remember why I stopped using del.icio.us in late 2009, but something must have happened and resulted in my bookmarking habits completely disappearing for a few years.

I’d say the most likely reason is that I had a few jobs which didn’t approve of using social websites or prohibited additional software (like browser plugins) from being installed. It was so painful to bookmark something that I stopped using del.icio.us and simply used local browser bookmarks. It took just a few months to completely break the habit of bookmarking interesting stuff into del.icio.us.

Recently, I’ve been a user of the Fetching service. It’s a great MacOS software that takes note of every website you’re visiting so that you can review it later. Text part of pages is indexed so you can search it locally or even have Fetching results show up in your Google searches. But looking back at a year plus of being a user, I noticed that mostly I used Fetching it as a bookmarking tool with tags.

This brings us to just a few weeks back, when I decided to give Pinboard a try. I heard about it a few times but wasn’t sure if it would work. And just like with any habit recently, this time I decided to give it a proper try: migrate my del.icio.us bookmarks, move bookmarks from Fetching, try bookmarking from my iPhone.

I’m quite happy with the results so far:

• 800+ bookmarks from del.icio.us – migrated within 30min
• 175 bookmarks from Fetching – took about 2h
• found out that Pinboard is supported in my RSS readers (ReadKit on MacOS and Reeder 3 on iOS)
• got Safari and Chrome extensions working so that I can bookmark using a keyboard shortcut
• found iOS app that allows to integrate Pinboard bookmarking into Safari for iOS

It’s only been a few weeks but I think the bookmarking habit is coming back to me. There’s certainly an added comfort in knowing that I may be organising my online bookmarks for the last time.