Pinteresting Problems
Relatively recently I signed up for Pinterest, because they had changed their interface such that one couldn't look at pins unless one was signed in (there was a Stylish workaround, but it no longer worked). Perhaps I should have gone off in a huff, and refused to join such a non-open site, but I missed being able to look at people's pins. Because there's an awful lot of good craft stuff there. And I really like looking at craft tutorials and examples of other people's work for inspiration. So, I joined. But I was sufficiently in a huff that I didn't join as Kerr Avonsen, but used another handle.
I joined and started pinning things as well as looking at pins. But I wasn't pinning tutorials (those I was bookmarking and/or saving offline with Scrapbook). I was pinning inspirations. Because images is where Pinterest has its strength. And I wanted to be able to look at pictures of fantastic wire-work, and freeform crochet, and clever jewellery ideas and so on. Before I knew it, I had four boards with over three hundred pins between them.
I got a bit frustrated, though, as to what to do about the tutorials that I also wanted to save from pins. Should I pin them on Pinterest? Should I bookmark them on my links page? Should I save them in Scrapbook? Should I stick them on my private wiki? Problem is, I was doing all those things, and my tutorials were scattered all over the place. But I also wanted to be able to have some public collections (things like crochet stitches) - that is, I'd been gathering tutorials and notes on crochet stitches (and Tunisian crochet stitches, and loom-knitting stitches) on my private wiki, which was useful to me but not to anyone else. So I wanted to figure out a good way of making them public. Also, I'd found that having image thumbnails associated with a bookmark was really helpful with things like stitch tutorials, because you had a picture of the stitch right there, a visual confirmation of what it was you were looking for. I mean, with things like "bobble stitch" and "puff stitch" and "popcorn stitch" all sounding terribly similar, having a picture of the actual stitch is very useful.
I considered my options:
* Pinterest had the advantage of one-click saving of bookmarks with pretty thumbnail images. However, it was somebody else's website, and it didn't provide a way of saving any of the tutorials if the tutorial's website went away.
* Shaarli is the bookmarking tool I use (it runs on my own server). It gave a partial solution, because (a) it does thumbnails of some sites (such as youtube and flikr) and (b) it can be configured to add a link to the Wayback Machine as part of every bookmark display, so that even if a site goes away, one can look at the version on the Wayback Machine (if one exists). But it was only a partial solution as far as images went.
* my private wiki would be fine for saving downloaded copies of tutorials, but not sharing them. And it was more effort to add the tutorials than to bookmark them. Plus it didn't have thumbnails.
* Scrapbook, likewise, could be used for saving but not sharing.
* Myyna and Cubetboard are both open source Pinterest work-alikes; if I could get them working, I would have my own server at least.
So I tried to get Myyna working, and it started up okay-ish. But it wasn't a PHP script, so it would be a little more involved interacting with my web-server. So I tried Cubetboard (which at least was a PHP script) but I couldn't even get it started. So I started Myyna again, and found, while I could add users and create boards, it would crash every time I tried to add a pin. 8-( That was no good at all!
So I fell back on Pinterest. I created three more boards and started moving my bookmarked stitch tutorials there.
Then it occurred to me that I didn't want to lose all this information, so I looked around to see if there was a way to save my pins outside of Pinterest. I came across several posts that decreed that one could save a Pinterest board by printing it to PDF. Well, Pinterest appear to have put the kybosh on that method, because when I did so (yes, I followed the instructions to scroll down to the last page of my board) the only pins that were saved were the ones visible when the print happened; thus, if I was on the last page, the last page was the ONLY visible thing in the PDF -- everything else was blank. The same thing happened when I tried to save a board to Scrapbook.
Perhaps I panicked. I know I was most displeased. Pinterest let you put things in, but you could never get them out! Well, you could get them out by hand, one pin at a time. A very painstakingly painful method. But I wasn't going to stay around with a mean website that wouldn't let me back up my own data! Meanies!
So. What was I to do now?
There was Shaarli, which had the advantage of being a PHP script running on my own server, and which had most of the features I wanted. But not all of them. But it was open source, it had a code repository on github, So I looked at their issue tracker to see if it said anything about thumbnails, and there was an interesting discussion about methods of grabbing thumbnails and whether they should have so much site-specific code in there or not. So then I pulled a copy of the code off the repository and started looking at the innards of it; how was it displaying the thumbnails? Where was it getting the thumbnail information from? And I figured out that if I changed this bit and added that bit, and added an extra field to the save-a-bookmark form, and tweaked this and checked that... that I could add my own thumbnails to my bookmarks. No, it wasn't a one-click thing anymore, I needed to cut and paste the URL of the image I wanted to use as a bookmark, but it was definitely better than nothing.
So. I started copying my pins, one pin at a time, from Pinterest into a special separate bookmarks page for craft (this version has the altered code; my original bookmarks page has the original script still).
This afternoon, I discovered the existence of Pinback, which actually DOES work as a backup tool for Pinterest - you lose all the images of course, but it does save the bookmarks and descriptions. So I used that to grab ALL my pins, and import them into Shaarli (fortunately they both used the same bookmark-file format so they understood each other). So, the bookmarks are saved, whew!
I still need to go through all three-hundred-odd bookmarks and add tags and thumbnails to them all, so that's still a huge amount of work. Oh well. I've set all those incomplete bookmarks to "private" so only I can see them. The ones in public view are properly tagged and mostly thumbnailed. So, if you want to see my work in progress, pop over to Craft Marks and take a look.
This entry was originally posted at http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/1030294.html. (Comments
) Respond here, or respond on the Dreamwidth post, as you prefer. You can use your DW login or OpenId there.
I joined and started pinning things as well as looking at pins. But I wasn't pinning tutorials (those I was bookmarking and/or saving offline with Scrapbook). I was pinning inspirations. Because images is where Pinterest has its strength. And I wanted to be able to look at pictures of fantastic wire-work, and freeform crochet, and clever jewellery ideas and so on. Before I knew it, I had four boards with over three hundred pins between them.
I got a bit frustrated, though, as to what to do about the tutorials that I also wanted to save from pins. Should I pin them on Pinterest? Should I bookmark them on my links page? Should I save them in Scrapbook? Should I stick them on my private wiki? Problem is, I was doing all those things, and my tutorials were scattered all over the place. But I also wanted to be able to have some public collections (things like crochet stitches) - that is, I'd been gathering tutorials and notes on crochet stitches (and Tunisian crochet stitches, and loom-knitting stitches) on my private wiki, which was useful to me but not to anyone else. So I wanted to figure out a good way of making them public. Also, I'd found that having image thumbnails associated with a bookmark was really helpful with things like stitch tutorials, because you had a picture of the stitch right there, a visual confirmation of what it was you were looking for. I mean, with things like "bobble stitch" and "puff stitch" and "popcorn stitch" all sounding terribly similar, having a picture of the actual stitch is very useful.
I considered my options:
* Pinterest had the advantage of one-click saving of bookmarks with pretty thumbnail images. However, it was somebody else's website, and it didn't provide a way of saving any of the tutorials if the tutorial's website went away.
* Shaarli is the bookmarking tool I use (it runs on my own server). It gave a partial solution, because (a) it does thumbnails of some sites (such as youtube and flikr) and (b) it can be configured to add a link to the Wayback Machine as part of every bookmark display, so that even if a site goes away, one can look at the version on the Wayback Machine (if one exists). But it was only a partial solution as far as images went.
* my private wiki would be fine for saving downloaded copies of tutorials, but not sharing them. And it was more effort to add the tutorials than to bookmark them. Plus it didn't have thumbnails.
* Scrapbook, likewise, could be used for saving but not sharing.
* Myyna and Cubetboard are both open source Pinterest work-alikes; if I could get them working, I would have my own server at least.
So I tried to get Myyna working, and it started up okay-ish. But it wasn't a PHP script, so it would be a little more involved interacting with my web-server. So I tried Cubetboard (which at least was a PHP script) but I couldn't even get it started. So I started Myyna again, and found, while I could add users and create boards, it would crash every time I tried to add a pin. 8-( That was no good at all!
So I fell back on Pinterest. I created three more boards and started moving my bookmarked stitch tutorials there.
Then it occurred to me that I didn't want to lose all this information, so I looked around to see if there was a way to save my pins outside of Pinterest. I came across several posts that decreed that one could save a Pinterest board by printing it to PDF. Well, Pinterest appear to have put the kybosh on that method, because when I did so (yes, I followed the instructions to scroll down to the last page of my board) the only pins that were saved were the ones visible when the print happened; thus, if I was on the last page, the last page was the ONLY visible thing in the PDF -- everything else was blank. The same thing happened when I tried to save a board to Scrapbook.
Perhaps I panicked. I know I was most displeased. Pinterest let you put things in, but you could never get them out! Well, you could get them out by hand, one pin at a time. A very painstakingly painful method. But I wasn't going to stay around with a mean website that wouldn't let me back up my own data! Meanies!
So. What was I to do now?
There was Shaarli, which had the advantage of being a PHP script running on my own server, and which had most of the features I wanted. But not all of them. But it was open source, it had a code repository on github, So I looked at their issue tracker to see if it said anything about thumbnails, and there was an interesting discussion about methods of grabbing thumbnails and whether they should have so much site-specific code in there or not. So then I pulled a copy of the code off the repository and started looking at the innards of it; how was it displaying the thumbnails? Where was it getting the thumbnail information from? And I figured out that if I changed this bit and added that bit, and added an extra field to the save-a-bookmark form, and tweaked this and checked that... that I could add my own thumbnails to my bookmarks. No, it wasn't a one-click thing anymore, I needed to cut and paste the URL of the image I wanted to use as a bookmark, but it was definitely better than nothing.
So. I started copying my pins, one pin at a time, from Pinterest into a special separate bookmarks page for craft (this version has the altered code; my original bookmarks page has the original script still).
This afternoon, I discovered the existence of Pinback, which actually DOES work as a backup tool for Pinterest - you lose all the images of course, but it does save the bookmarks and descriptions. So I used that to grab ALL my pins, and import them into Shaarli (fortunately they both used the same bookmark-file format so they understood each other). So, the bookmarks are saved, whew!
I still need to go through all three-hundred-odd bookmarks and add tags and thumbnails to them all, so that's still a huge amount of work. Oh well. I've set all those incomplete bookmarks to "private" so only I can see them. The ones in public view are properly tagged and mostly thumbnailed. So, if you want to see my work in progress, pop over to Craft Marks and take a look.
This entry was originally posted at http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/1030294.html. (Comments
) Respond here, or respond on the Dreamwidth post, as you prefer. You can use your DW login or OpenId there.