English_15.0. Interview: Meet Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard.in. I’m excited to present an interview today with Maciej Ceglowski, the developer behind Pinboard.in. Pinboard is an increasingly popular bookmarking service, taking up where Delicious left off. It’s a for-pay app with a unique pricing structure, as well as a subscription link archival service. I first reviewed Pinboard last December after it seemed that Delicious was being shut down. Since then, it’s become one of the web apps I rely on the most, and we’ve included it in a number of recent roundups.
I store all of my new bookmarks in it, but then it also automatically imports my Instapaper and Twitter favorites, and saves an archive of all my Tweets. After the break, Marciej shares with us some of his development tools, thoughts on design, and some unique Pinboard features. Tell us a bit about yourself and Pinboard. I started Pinboard in the spring of 2009 and opened it up to paying users in early July of that year.
What’s your daily workflow like? No, that way lies madness. I believe so. Hacker Chat: Pinboard Creator Maciej Ceglowski Talks About Why Boring Architecture is Good, and More. Maciej Ceglowski created Pinboard in 2009 "partly out of frustration with a redesign of Delicious that I felt removed a lot of utility from the site, and partly because I had long wanted to have a boomarking site that would archive my bookmarks," according to the About page. Since then, the site has become a popular alternative to Delicious and Ceglowski is now able to make a living on it. Pinboard runs entirely on a traditional LAMP stack, and it runs amazingly fast.
We talked with Ceglowski about the Pinboard architecture and his development process. The Pinboard about page says: "There is absolutely nothing interesting about the Pinboard architecture or implementation; I consider that a feature! " Can you explain why you think that's a feature? I believe that relying on very basic and well-understood technologies at the architectural level forces you to save all your cleverness and new ideas for the actual app, where it can make a difference to users.
Do you work on Pinboard for a living? Maciej Ceglowski. Pinboard: social bookmarking for introverts. Anatomy of a Crushing. Anatomy of a Crushing A number of people asked about the technical aspects of the great Delicious exodus of 2010, and I've finally had some time to write it up. Note that times on all the graphs are UTC. On December 16th Yahoo held an all-hands meeting to rally the troops after a big round of layoffs. Around 11 AM someone at this meeting showed a slide with a couple of Yahoo properties grouped into three categories, one of which was ominously called "sunset".
The most prominent logo in the group belonged to Delicious, our main competitor. Milliseconds later, the slide was on the web, and there was an ominous thundering sound as every Delicious user in North America raced for the exit. I got the message just as I was starting work for the day. Before this moment, our relationship to Delicious had been that of a tick to an elephant. I've previously posted this graph of Pinboard web traffic on the days immediately before and after the Delicious announcement. We had no public status page. Two Years of Pinboard. Two Years of Pinboard Two years ago I started taking money from people in return for no-frills bookmarking. The signup price was rigged to grow by a fraction of a penny with each new user; it started at $2.04 for our very first customer (who immediately demanded a refund) and quickly soared to near the three dollar mark. I posted our vital signs last year on this day; here's an update from twelve months later: 27 million bookmarks12,500 active users16 million URLs3 TB of archived content99.8% uptime (29 hours offline) These stats include the two big events of the past year.
This was a lot of excitement for one year. No birthday post would be complete without the laundry list of new features we've added this year: One Year Of Pinboard. One Year Of Pinboard A year ago today this site left the comfortable womb of beta testing and started charging for new accounts. Here are some of our vital signs, one year in: 3.5 million bookmarks11.2 million tags2.5 million urls187 GB of archived content99.91% uptime (6 hours offline) And here are some of the features we've added to the site in our first twelve months: Over the past year, we've had about six hours of cumulative downtime, when the website was unreachable.
We also have a long list of bugs to squash and new features to roll out in an effort to make sure Pinboard remains the best value for your bookmarking dollar. If you don't see a feature you want, or if you have specific questions about our plans for the site, please don't hesitate to ask on the Google group. A site like this is a real pleasure to work on. I also owe a big birthday thank you to honorary co-founder Peter, who has helped me keep the site running while keeping a sharp eye out for customer requests.
Six Months of Pinboard. Six Months of Pinboard We started offering paid accounts on Pinboard on July 7. At the time, the service wasn't much more than a clone of pre-Yahoo delicious, with the addition of some common-sense features that the original del had weirdly lacked (things like a 'toread' status, long description field, or default privacy settings). Back then, our userbase consisted of about thirty intrepid testers who had volunteered to shake out bugs. The site ran on a little Xen instance and stored a few thousand bookmarks. The Pinboard global operations center was a laptop in the kitchen of a somewhat beat-up Moldavian apartment.
Today, Pinboard has grown to about 1200 active users, and we're coming up on our two millionth bookmark. We store about a hundred gigabytes of crawled content. It is particularly pleasing to report that the site remains spam free, and that we have had no downtime or significant slowdowns since launch. There have been two big surprises in the past six months. Co-Prosperity Winners. Pinboard Co-Prosperity Winners Today I am delighted to announce the six projects I have selected for the inaugural round of the Pinboard Co-Prosperity Cloud.
I received 306 applications in total, many of them extremely strong, and narrowing them down to six was not easy. It meant saying no to some very good ideas, and I hope that many people who received a rejection will show me up by creating a successful small business anyway. The six finalists represent a mix of projects that I think are tractable, useful, clever, and capable of bringing their creators financial independence. They are, in no specific order: Alex "Skud" Bayley, Australia, Growstuff Growstuff is a website where food gardeners will be able to track and share their food-growing efforts. Luiz Irber and Guilherme Castelao, Brazil. If you've ever had to deal with marine weather forecasts, you will immediately see the appeal of this idea. Nik White, United States, Simple Cyber Security Bernard Huang, United States.