Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box

A list of helpful Chrome extensions for Pinboard

2011-09-29T10:35:37Z

Since I posted my Pinboard sidebar and custom buttons tutorial for Firefox yesterday, people have been asking about Chrome. I don't use extensions or addons in Chrome myself (Chrome is my sleek and fast browser), but I promised to look into it.

I started by looking for extensions that are already out there, since I have no idea how to make extensions for Chrome. I went to the Chrome webstore (https://chrome.google.com/webstore), did a search for Pinboard, installed all the extensions, and tested them. These are the ones that I think are useful:

( Screenshots and descriptions )

That's it. All the other extensions I tried didn't convince me. These six offer a lot of the functionalities the Firefox custom buttons and sidebar I showed yesterday did, plus more.

The following is missing:
1) There's no actual sidebar, but the Pinboard extension does something similar and is actually sleeker than the sidebar, plus allowing for tag filtering (with multiple tags!).
2) None of the extensions support the "popup with tags" option. This might be a real drawback for some people.
3) Only one extension (4) contains a link to your network. None of them offer a network sidebar. Again, might be a drawback for some.

If anyone is still interested in a real sidebar, a popup with tags option, quick access to your network, or any of the other stuff I showed for Firefox, let me know! I'll look into it.

(Also: feedback is love. Anonymous comments are enabled, IP logging is off.)

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Tutorial: Adding a pinboard sidebar and custom pinboard buttons to Firefox

2011-09-28T20:42:26Z

[UPDATE: I made another post for Chrome extensions]
[UPDATE the second: The popup with tags button now has a scrollbar. (Thank you to the anon who provided the code in the google doc.)]

This is a tutorial for adding a Pinboard sidebar and custom Pinboard buttons to Firefox. Hope it helps some people!

One thing I really liked about the old Delicious was the Firefox addon. I use sidebars a lot, and I love customized toolbars. I didn't really use the Delicious toolbar, but Firefox allows you to drag buttons that you like into other toolbars (in my case the amazing All-in-One Sidebar, see http://firefox.exxile.net/aios/index.php).

Pinboard offers only a very basic browser addon (no real toolbar and no sidebar), plus the bookmarklets that you can drag and drop anywhere you like. However, when I first got my pinboard account (back when Yahoo announced they'd shut down Delicious) I spent some time fiddling with the Pinboard bookmarklets and made them into pretty buttons. I also made a button for a Pinboard sidebar.* Now that more people are leaving Delicious for Pinboard, I figured these might be useful for other users.

( Screenshots and instructions under the cut )

* Well. It's the Pinboard mobile version opening in your Firefox sidebar. Not a replacement for the Delicious sidebar, but Maciej (the Pinboard owner) has said that he will not be implementing a real sidebar anytime soon because it would require too much coding. So this is the best you'll get.

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