Published on to joshleeb's blog
Imagine, if you will, a garden out the front of a cottage with a path leading to the door. There are many shades of green from the various plants, and a colorful mix of flowers packed together with herbs, fruits, and vegetables.
This garden might be immaculately pruned and arranged, or it might be allowed to remain wild and unkempt. Sometimes you can find exactly the fruit or flower you’re looking for and it will save you a trip to the supermarket. Sometimes, rather than searching, it’s more enjoyable to explore or to sit, relax, and enjoy being in the garden.
Pinto is a project that started from wanting to connect Pinboard with an RSS reader and a few other interesting features, particularly around organizing links.
The motivation was (and still is) that I enjoy reading long-form, information dense writing but I don’t always have the time, energy, or mental capacity to engage with these kinds of posts in the way I would like. I do feel, however, a need to save these articles and blog posts as I often come across them serendipitously and they can be difficult to find again in the future.
A naive reading list wasn’t what I was looking for because it would quickly grow unusable with all the pages I would save. Often I wouldn’t even be saving a page to deliberately read later, diluting the effectiveness of the reading list. Rather I would be building up a corpus of writing I appreciated, and on topics I found interesting and expected to refer back to when that interest turned to a motivation to learn and explore a particular domain.
So, I started exploring by building a bookmarking system. One that had an in-built reading list but was much more versatile than a reading list alone.
Before long I had developed a Pinboard-like bookmarking tool to a point where I was using it daily but I quickly ran into issues with organizing bookmarks. Organization in Pinboard (and early versions of Pinto) was centered around tagging. Now the problems of tagging are well known but I wanted to explore variations, namely hierarchical and scoped tagging.
These tagging systems helped with organization, and at the time I wrote about them hopefully, but they took a lot of effort to maintain, only to become disorganized again. What would start out as order eventually turned to chaos. While it certainly was an option to employ techniques to automatically suggest tags, that felt more like a bandaid than a fix. No, the root of the problem I came to think was bookmarking in the traditional sense.
That brings us into the now, where I have been mulling over further thoughts for where next to take the exploration of Pinto.
Through this process, the motivation has remained the same but the core idea has shifted significantly. I am no longer thinking about Pinto as Pinboard + RSS. Instead, I am imagining a system for managing and growing a corpus of interesting articles on the web; a system for facilitating the cultivation of my own corner of the internet.
I am thinking of Pinto in terms of a system for curating my own subgraph of the web.
This is a bit high level at the moment which is because I’m in the early stages of figuring out what this new direction actually looks like. Part of this process will be achieved through spikes and more daily-driven concepts (such as Kar), but the other approach I’m also taking is to consider Pinto through analogy.
I am seeing Pinto as a garden out the front of a cottage. A garden with many kinds of plants, each with hundreds or thousands of leaves, cultivated to match the interests of its curator. A garden that might provide exactly what you’re looking for when searching, or just be a fun place to explore. A garden that is a web, a diverse ecosystem, that has no walls, no corporate overseers, and is not built on a platform designed for harvesting. A natural garden full of life and greenery, that has been grown and not generated - that reminds me of the old web.