What seems like eons ago I switched from Instapaper to Safari Reading List as my primary means of saving links to read them later. There were two impetuses for switching: the first was that Instapaper had just been sold; and the second was that with Safari Reading List I could tap and hold links almost anywhere in iOS and save a link for later. Good stuff.
There are three major problems with Safari Reading List:
- It didn’t always save the links that I wanted it to save. So I had no confidence in the system, which lead to constant checking just to see if things were saved.
- As any Reading List user knows, there are many times when you cannot remove a saved link because ‘Safari Reading List is Syncing’ or some shit like that.
- Syncing is painfully slow across devices.
All of this was just too much for me, so I wanted to find a new system. But what? I needed something with a lot of support in apps, something that was dead simple, something that was fast, and something that I could pay for to support the service.
I went with Pinboard.in and I’ve been using it for a few months now. It’s fantastic. A little bit more work in some areas,but it has none of the problems which Reading List has.
I’ve never really used Pinboard that thoroughly, though I’ve long had an account, but man is it fast and easy. It has fairly wide support, though not as wide as Instapaper or Pocket, but is far more simplistic than either of those.
With Pinner on iOS I am able to use the share sheet in iOS to add links from almost any app these days. This is also where I got to read my saved items. On the Mac I use Spillio to select what to read next and search through old bookmarks. It take a bit to get used to, but as long as you don’t need offline mode it’s near perfect.
The change for me isn’t that notable on it’s own, but I have made a conscious effort to not only save read later links to Pinboard, but to also save all bookmarks to Pinboard, thus giving me a much better archive of things I read on the web. That’s truly the nicest feature of the entire move: I now have one repository to search — and that I thought was worth mentioning.
Now I can search my general: I like/want/need this bookmarks, alongside articles I read. Chances are, if there was an article I liked or read, it will be easily searchable in Pinboard and thus I spend less time trying to find that “thing” I read.