I continue to maintain my linkblog; here's how it works these days. It's all managed via a Pinboard account. Every time I see something I want to linkblog, I add it as an URL to Pinboard with a browser extension. My Pinboard page is the web view of my linkblog. Pinboard also publishes an RSS feed for my followers. I also use dlvr.it to automatically tweet my links to a Twitter account.

The Twitter account has been very successful for me, it's a natural form of engagement for the short form. (The follower number is hugely inflated because it was a featured account for a couple of hours a long time back.) The Pinboard extension is great because it makes it very easy to linkblog any URL I'm looking at. I also like that Pinboard archives the full text of pages I link ($25/year); I often find myself searching my own linkblog. The one drawback to my setup is the web view is ugly. That's kind of purpose, I expect people to mostly follow via RSS or Twitter. But I may yet use IFTTT or the like to set up a Tumblr for a nicer web view.

I've moved my linkblog to Pinboard. If you follow it already you'll want to update your RSS subscription. If you don't follow it, you should! My linkblog has better content than this text blog. Links are on the sidebar at left but best enjoyed via your RSS reader of choice.

Many thanks to the Delicious and Yahoo crew; they served me well for hosting for four years. I decided not to follow along with the AVOS purchase, not for any particular reason but because it seemed uncertain. A big thank you to Joshua and Delicious for having a fantastic, easy export of all my data. That's an important user right more sites should support and more users should demand.

Pinboard works great and is simple. I like that I'm a (modestly) paying customer. I particularly appreciate that the search function works so well: Yahoo never got that right. I was also impressed by Maciej's postmortem when the site got crushed after the Delicious shutdown rumour. He's a smart engineer. All the cool kids seem to be on Pinboard now, I'm in good company.

I've moved my little linkblog over to del.icio.us. Everything should work the same as before and the RSS feed is redirected to its new home. But I had to mix a few different flavours of chewing gum to hold this together; if something went wrong, please mail me.

Why the change? Because linkblogs are most interesting as a social phenomenon and I wanted to share my linkblog with a bunch of other people. And because I like outsourcing the hosting of the things I do. The del.icio.us data model is close enough to my own that it was an easy shift. Who knows, I may even do the tagging thing the kids these days are into.

The migration was surprisingly difficult. I ran into a couple of rate limiting problems moving 4200 links into del.icio.us (one of which I fixed). Even now the result isn't perfect; delicious claims to only update the RSS feed every 30 minutes so my linkblog in the left column on my blog will now have a posting delay. But the data is all in a central place now and I have less code to maintain; the change was worth the effort.

Thanks to François my linkblog is now in Hot Links, the cool linkblog aggregator. Hit the 4+ page for a quick view of what the linkblog world is thinking about. Or look at me at 2+ to see what links I share with others.

I love Hot Links because the design is good and the thumbnails are surprisingly useful. For another linkblog aggregator (more data, less design) see delicious. And of course daypop, Blogdex, and Technorati give a view of what's hot in blogs in general.

Little did I know so many others had linkblogs. I'm subscribed to a bunch of them with Trillian's RSS plugin. Whenever someone posts a new link, it pops up like an instant message. It's like surfin along.

I've added a new feature, my linkblog. It contains a bunch of links to stuff I accumulate. It's over there on the left, in the sidebar. It's also available as a very spartan blog of its own: useful for RSS. Here are the pieces:

linkblog.py

Python CGI that creates a bookmarklet and accepts input from it. Standalone tool.

Blosxom

The weblog engine for the linkblog

linknote

Blosxom plugin for my linkblog to read entries from the single file that linkblog.py writes out

linkblog

Blosxom plugin for my main blog that includes the output of the linknote-driven blog (see below)

include flavour

Blosxom flavour that prints out data with no Content-Type; the main blog calls this in linkblog

lastmodified plugin

Hacked up version of the lastmodified plugin

It's handy for the linkblog to itself be Blosxom; that way you get RSS, plugins, archives, etc for free. This dynamic inclusion may not be worth the trouble; I could have made it a static blog and included it as a file, or I could have used an iframe. It works but it's fragile. Particularly concerning the interaction with the lastmodified plugin.