Pinboarder turns a Pinboard feed into a mostly functional Blog system.
Pinboard.in is a social bookmarking site that gathers and keeps your favourite links in order. It makes sense that if you're already collecting the best of the web in one place and you wanted to start a curation type blog, then being able to tie the blog system into your Pinboard account would seem like a very good idea indeed.
Pinboard has a very accessible API, if you want to view all the shared links from "Chaos", well you can just go to http://feeds.pinboard.in/json/v1/u:chaos and you'll get a nice json stream of all the posts. Further, if you wish to only view posts tagged with "Apple" you can simply go to http://feeds.pinboard.in/json/v1/u:chaos/t:Apple/.
What Pinboarder does is create a small database, and then queries Pinboard for all the posts at a particular feed, it runs down the list and creates entries for all the bookmarked posts. Then you can just login to the admin side of the site and manage the posts, edit the content here and there (by default it'll pull in the Pinboard notes) or hide it from public view.
It also creates a unique hash of each of the posts, so even if you change the title, it will know not to import the old one next time you run an update.
- Git clone the repository to your computer
- Create a Python virtual environment and activate it
- Install the requirements (
pip install -r requirements.txt) - Create the initial database
setup.py(edit this to set the default admin). - Run the server
rundebug.py - Access the site at http://127.0.0.1:5000
I'll add a better deployment mechanism so you can very easily deploy an instance to the wonderful Heroku.
I shall be documenting this project on my site soon, and I'll leave a link here when I do-- mostly as a tutorial for new people coming into the Flask web development framework.
Lots of tweaks required in the not too distant future--
- The pinboard refresh function is fired on request at the moment, it should run automatically in the background really.
- The Feed url is hardcoded in the
config.pyfile at the moment, I should move that into the admin interface. - Be a good neighbour and query Pinboard in a more frugal way. At present when a update is requested, all the posts matching are returned, if a user had thousands of posts that would be a bit unfair to Pinboard's bandwidth. Instead it should memorize the last sucessful update, then just ask the Pinboard API for all posts newer than that time.
- Improve the user interface so it's a working theme that someone might actually be happy to use. Maybe even add some theme options if I get really productive.
- Add a few blueprints to break the site apart, at least to document in the tutorial to make it a more complete introduction.