Nerve Endings Firing Away

Yesterday, I reviewed the new startup bookmarking service, Pinboard and how it surpasses Delicious in archiving your links. One of the few things that kept me from switching to Pinboard was the availability of a bookmarking feature within my favorite RSS feed reader, NetNewsWire (will be reviewed later). To tag a link within browsers, Pinboard provides bookmarklets that either open a pop-up window or in the same page. Clicking those bookmarklets opens up the windows pre-filled with the URL and selected text in the description fields and all you have to do is to enter the tag (suggested and popular tags are provided) and hit submit. If you are using the same-page bookmarklet, it will take you to original page that you just bookmarked after you are done.

Posting to Delicious comes bundled with NetNewsWire so naturally, it works right out of the box. Setting up bookmarking for Pinboard is easy and once you have it set up, tagging posts is much easier than for Delicious. Here’s how:

Saving the Script for Pinboard

• Go to the Pinboard Howto page on the top of your profile page. Right-click the ‘same page’ bookmarklet and choose Copy Link Location.
• Paste the link in a text editor (preferably Text Wrangler) and save as pinboard.js
• It will look something like this:
  

  javascript:if(document.getSelection){s=document.getSelection();}else{s='';};document.location='http://pinboard.in/add?next=same&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&description='+encodeURIComponent(s)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)

• Copy pinboard.js to Library > Application Support > NetNewsWire > Scripts

Basically now, you are ready and can bookmark any page open in NetNewsWire to Pinboard by going to Scroll icon on the menu bar (left of Help; see image) and clicking on pinboard.js option. But as you see, I’ve assigned a keyboard shortcut to that option so you don’t have to drag your mouse up there every time you want to tag a link.

Note: You should make sure JavaScript is enabled in NetNewsWire’s preferences for browsing web pages.

Assigning a keyboard shortcut

• Assign a keyboard shortcut is simple and uses the generic process in every Mac. Go to your Mac’s System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Application Shortcuts (on the left bar).
• Add ‘NetNewsWire’ application in the list if not yet available and enter in the shortcut to pinboard.js. I used Shift+Cmd+P but you can assign anything.
• That’s it! Open in item in NetNewsWire and hit your shortcut and it will be posted to Pinboard.

Limitations and Advantages over Delicious

There are some limitations though; the script for pop-up bookmarklet doesn’t work so the tagging window will open in your open tab; after tagging however, it returns to your original tab. Also, I don’t know how to add this script to the right-click option within NetNewsWire. How is it better than Delicious tagging? Selecting the text before bookmarking puts the text in the Description field for Pinboard but doing the same strangely doesn’t work for Delicious. You’ve to manually cut-paste a quote from the article or write up a description. Also, the shortcut for Delicious tagging is Ctlr+Command+' which honestly is quite baffling and hard to remember whereas that for Pinboard is completely up to you.

Other Scripts for NetNewsWire

Thanks to Rob Well for his instructions on adding the script for Readability in NetNewsWire. I simply adapted it for Pinboard. Similarly, you can use the TwitNews script for posting to Twitter from NetNewsWire. I use these three tools – Pinboard Tagging, Readability, and TwitNews – within NetNewsWire and thanks to the tab feature within the RSS reader, I rarely have to open links in my browser (although you easily can).

There is a case to be made for using desktop RSS feed readers as opposed to web-based but that’ll have to be done later. And yes, NetNewsWire syncs with Google Reader so you don’t have to abandon that excellent web application. This was originally published on Pinboard’s dev Google Groups.