Automatic Pinboard bookmarks from Twitter

August 15, 2009 / Pinboard can now grab your Twitter links automagically.

Pinboard developer Maciej Cegłowski on a rad new feature:

You can now turn on a setting that will monitor a Twitter username and automatically add any bookmarks posted to their public stream.

Tweets containing URLs will post as a regular bookmark, with the “toread” flag set, and the tag “from:twitter” automatically added. Any #hashtags that appear in the tweet will be converted into a pair of tags—one of them with the prepended hash, and one without (so for a tweet containing “#foo”, pinboard will add tags “foo” and “#foo”).

Pinboard will dereference any shortened URLs to their full form before saving the bookmark. It will also try to get the title of the link to use as the bookmark title. In cases where that doesn’t work, the title will post as “Untitled (URL)”.

Clever and useful. The default posting behaviour is well-considered. I enabled the option to save bookmarks as private by default so that I can tidy up/delete the incoming Twitter links before making the good ones public. I am really starting to like using Pinboard.

† Though the app’s markup could use some semantic goodness.

2 responses

  1. Maciej Ceglowski

    Hey, thanks for the kind words!

    If you let me know what needs fixing in the markup, I’ll be happy to add the tasks to my TODO list.

    August 15th, 2009 at 12:45 pm #

  2. Adrian Cooke

    Maciej, in the blog the post titles could be marked up as a heading and have a unique id so that one could link directly to that heading. Similarly, on the main user page the link titles could be marked up with a heading of some kind. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

    August 15th, 2009 at 1:19 pm #


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