After much dithering back and forth, I finally decided to give Raindrop.io a try, over the weekend.
TL;DR: I think I’m going to switch over from Pinboard, and use this as my main bookmark manager from now on.
More detail:
Starting an account was quick and easy. And importing my Pinboard bookmarks was easy too. I have around 20,000 bookmarks in Pinboard. Exporting from Pinboard is easy enough, and I’ve been doing that periodically, as a backup in case Pinboard goes down. Raindrop had no issue handling Pinboard’s JSON export file. It took a little less than ten minutes to complete the import.
The one big missing feature in Raindrop is an “unread” flag. In Pinboard, I had around 1500 unread bookmarks. So that status didn’t transfer. (Raindrop also doesn’t support the “private” flag, but that one wasn’t important to me.)
It occurs to me now that I could have written a little program to go through Pinboard’s JSON file, looking for the “toread:yes” field, then adding an “unread” tag to all of those bookmarks. Oh well. Too late for that now!
What I’m doing instead is putting Pinboard in one browser tab and Raindrop in another, going through the unread Pinboard links, and deciding what to do with them. For those that point to NY Times stories, I’m just adding them to my Times reading list. Ditto for Washington Post articles. For some, they were just quick temporary bookmarks that I never got around to deleting, so I’m deleting them. For music links, I’m trying to add them to MusicBox. And for YouTube links, I’m adding them to Play. For the rest, if I still want to read them, I’m adding an “unread” tag.
I might later change that to an “unread” collection. Collections are an interesting feature in Raindrop, but I’m not sure what I’m going to do with them yet.
Raindrop has a pretty good web interface, and a decent browser extension for Firefox. The iOS app is pretty good too. I could probably nitpick a few things about them, and there are definitely a few things that Pinboard does better, but I’m happy with them.
I like very much that Raindrop has a first-party app for iOS. I’ve used a few third-party apps for Pinboard, and there are always issues with them. (No fault of the developers, generally. It’s mostly API issues/limitations, I think.)
Raindrop also has a broken link detector (once you pay for the Pro plan, which I did today). It’s showing me 630 broken links right now, so I’m going through those too, trying to clean them up.
The one thing that kept me away from Raindrop until now is that it’s blocked at work, while Pinboard isn’t. No clue why. Bookmarking isn’t really a security risk, as far as I can tell. So I’m going to need to come up with some kind of workflow for work-related bookmarks. I’m really not sure what I’m going to do there yet.
Anyway, I have spent way too much time over the last couple of days organizing bookmarks. I know that I don’t need to go nuts with that, but I can’t help myself. And I do occasionally stumble across something cool that I’d forgotten about, so there is some reward to it.