A small update to my linkblog that you probably won’t notice: I’m now using self-hosted linkding as the backend instead of Pinboard.

I switched to pinboard back in 2011 and have appreciated having a hosted service all these years. But development on the product stagnated long ago and the last few years service quality has been erratic. Right now the service is down because the domain registration expired. It’s galling that I had to log in to Nazi Twitter to even see what’s going on with the service.

I’ve been running my linkblog since 2003 and have rearchitected it a few times. The last big change was about four years ago when I built a custom static site generator to format the link database as a web page. I got that code right, I haven’t really had to touch it in four years. It may be the last piece of substantial software I ever write without AI tools. I had Jules make the minor linkding code changes yesterday.

I've added an archive calendar to my linkblog, so you can see old posts going all the way back to 2003. The UI is a little minimal but usable and it will work for any search indexers, which is what I most care about. Note old posts will have a grey background because I wasn't classifying link sentiment (new posts are white or black).

The most fun thing here are the images; I generated them for all my old links. Of course that's only possible if the site is up, I generated most of these in July 2022.

I've got a total of 20,700 links going back 19 years; that's an average of about 90 a month. I've been pretty steady the whole time, 50-150 a month with no missing time. A key thing is it's very easy for me to linkblog a new post, I just use the Pinboard browser extension and it's done.

The time sorted archive is not too thrilling. The other choice here would be to use the tags somehow to extract archives by topic, maybe cluster in to categories or (god forbid) do a tag cloud. A project for another time.

I've got a new feed for my linkblog. It's at This new feed is nicer and includes my own image previews, although depending on your feed reader that may or may not have any effect. The old feed at Pinboard will still work but isn't as fancy.

I launched a new website for my linkblog; go check it out! I'm proud of how it looks.

My linkblog is a collection of links I find interesting. I write it for an audience, a few links a day of general interest. I've been doing this for 19 years now and I think it's one of the best things I publish.

Link blogging is a venerable form that both was a part of the very first blogs and predates blogs with definitive 90s web sites like Cool Site of the Day. It's no longer fashionable although its spirit lives on in every social media share button. The distinguishing factor of a linkblog is the link itself is the focus. Minimal extra content; I average 10 words a link.

The novel thing on my new website is sentiment. I decide whether the link will make readers feel better or worse and color the post white or black. I think it's important to share negative stories but I don't want to overwhelm everyone with doomscrolling. The other fancy thing is a prominent image for every post. They're a combination of website previews from metascraper and screenshots from shot-scraper.

The primary datastore is still my Pinboard account, the RSS is served directly from there. I also have been posting links to Twitter @somebitslinks; that works pretty well.

I wish I had more reach! Only 12 people said they read it on Twitter (despite 7400 followers!). I have more readers via RSS; Feedly shows 100, there's a few more on Slacks. Kind of sad but I accept what I'm doing is not mainstream. I don't think this new web view will bring in the masses but it feels like an important part of making my linkblog more of a real thing.

Technical notes about how it works are on my secret work blog. I also have older posts about my linkblog. As always, feedback is welcome.