We took Ben out to dinner for his birthday last night, came back to our room in Eugene, and I gave Linkding a try on a PikaPod. It’s very similar to pinboard in terms of the basic look, and it can import a pinboard export of the basic Netscape bookmarks.html file.

There are a few community tools that make it a reasonably complete pinboard replacement:

• A bookmarking extension for Firefox/Chrome. Works fine (though pinboard’s tag suggesting is nice and linkding doesn’t seem to have it)
• The linkding injector, which you can connect to your instance to inject a sidebar of related bookmarks into your search results (Google, DuckDuckGo, kagi, and Bing)
• The LinkThing app for iOS, which provides a decent mobile client (though they’re still working on a share sheet for it and you have to use a Shortcut for now).

For the way I use pinboard, that’s all pretty good.

Getting Synology reverse proxying and SSL working

Once I had Linkding working on the PikaPod I ran into a few problems with my DNS and SSL, and it just reminded me that I’ve been deferring a cleaner setup on my Synology.

I mentioned Marius Hosting’s tutorials a few days ago, and he’s got some stuff on how to set up SSL on a Synology with LetsEncrypt, and reverse proxies. It’s all concise and illustrated and “just works.” Combined with his increasingly efficient docs on how to get portainer up and running then use it to install an assortment of containers (including the one for Linkding), you can get a lot of eggs stuffed into that basket.

PikaPod still has a place

It suits me to truly be self-hosting all this stuff, just as a matter of “I wanted to learn how” and “if I’ve got the thing, I should use it.” PikaPod’s cool, though, because it’s one-click, cheap, and gives you a chance to kick the tires on these things before you do much work.