LI links_thing

After months of thinking about hosting my own bookmarks, I built links_thing in 2012; it was online by April, showing my last 50 bookmarks. It was a wiki on Semantic MediaWiki where each page in the Bookmark category is one bookmark with properties such as its URL, creation time and excerpt (Bookmarking with Semantic MediaWiki). Semantic Forms made entry easy, and a bookmarklet filled in the URL, title and excerpt of the page I was on. I imported just under 4,000 links from Pinboard’s JSON export with a small Python script and the Data Transfer extension.

Owning the data was the point: “It is mine,” I wrote. I could clean up every bookmark with regular-expression find and replace, and I added views no bookmarking service offered: bookmarks on a calendar, embedded YouTube and Vimeo videos, statistics, and a template that flagged short URLs and tracking tags for a bot to clean up. I was also building LinkBot, a scheduled Python program to validate URLs. On Open Loop #0 I described it as “35 lines of Python” that checked five random bookmarks an hour, followed redirects, and stripped tracking codes.

The wiki ran on my MediaWiki farm. By 2015 WikiApiary listed it among the farm’s defunct wikis, with 7,178 pages and a last sample in October 2014. I was collecting links in Pinboard again when I started the Weekly Thing in 2017 (Assembling the Weekly Thing).