New user question: Pinboard, archiving, and more

[briandigital]

Hi folks. I’m a newbie on a trial of DevonThink Pro. I could really benefit from some of your experience with this deep and complex product. I’ve spent about 10 hrs with it so far, and quite some time in these forums.

My goal is to unite my Markdown and plain text notes I have on my Mac (some from NValt, but stored as plain text), some notes I have in Evernote (not much, very sundry) and my significant archives on Pinboard (which itself imports my Instapaper articles). Going forward, I want DTP to be the first step for me to store personal or professional knowledge. Right now I’ve made two DBs: “Personal” “Professional”.

Here are the key things I haven’t figured out, that are key to my success with DTP:

Pinboard:

I am looking to import my links from Pinboard. However, for at least some subset of my saved bookmarks, I’d prefer to capture their corresponding pages, not just list a link like a browser bookmark does. I currently pay Pinboard for this feature, but I’d like to replace that with DevonThink’s capabilities locally. I stumbled over a Pinboard import script, but no docs to tell me how it works (with 6500 bookmarks, nearly 6000 of those archived I don’t want to experiment blindly).

Summary: I want to import all my Pinboard bookmarks. I would like to save web archives or more bare HTML versions of some of these bookmarks, which I can designate by tag. (E.g. If tag == design then archive.)

Follow up: If I continue to use Pinboard (without archiving), can DTP auto-download my bookmarks? (Say, ping 1x/hour for updates?)

Evernote:

I used the built-in import feature and nothing happened. I expected a pop up asking me for credentials or something. I have never used the native Mac app… only the iOS app and the web client on Mac. Is this DTP feature only able to read your Evernote files if they’re in the native Mac app?

Apple Notes:

Any way of monitoring and auto-importing these?

Email:

Once I get all of the above sorted out, my next quest will be the import of selected email… but I’ll save that for another post.

Thanks for any help you can offer!
~brian

[BLUEFROG]

Summary: I want to import all my Pinboard bookmarks. I would like to save web archives or more bare HTML versions of some of these bookmarks, which I can designate by tag. (E.g. If tag == design then archive.)

On the path of least resistance, there isn’t going to be a one-script-fits-all here.
It would be possible to import all your Pinboard bookmarks then run a second script to convert certain selected bookmarks to PDF or web archives.

Follow up: If I continue to use Pinboard (without archiving), can DTP auto-download my bookmarks? (Say, ping 1x/hour for updates?)

Could it be done? Potentially, but it’s not built in and it would take some extra coding / testing.

Is this DTP feature only able to read your Evernote files if they’re in the native Mac app?

Yep. You have to have Evernote installed on the Mac for it to work.

Apple Notes:
Any way of monitoring and auto-importing these?

Nope. This is not something that is easily done, in general.

[korm]

You can grab the address for an RSS feed from your Pinboard account and then create a “Feed” in DEVONthink. You might need a paid account at Pinboard for this but it’s very cheap and worth it. This will enable you to keep up with the new bookmarks in Pinboard.

[BLUEFROG]

@korm: Nice idea. (Hmm… that might have potential future use too… )

[s3mpai]

@korm

You can grab the address for an RSS feed from your Pinboard account and then create a “Feed” in DEVONthink. You might need a paid account at Pinboard for this but it’s very cheap and worth it. This will enable you to keep up with the new bookmarks in Pinboard.

All accounts at pinboard are paid accounts.

[korm]

@s3mpai

@korm

You can grab the address for an RSS feed from your Pinboard account and then create a “Feed” in DEVONthink. You might need a paid account at Pinboard for this but it’s very cheap and worth it. This will enable you to keep up with the new bookmarks in Pinboard.

All accounts at pinboard are paid accounts.

Well, there you go. I’ve had an account so long I never noticed they went to all-paid.

[thoresson]

@briandigital

Follow up: If I continue to use Pinboard (without archiving), can DTP auto-download my bookmarks? (Say, ping 1x/hour for updates?)

I’ve solved this by adding the RSS-feed of my Pinboard account into DT. Once a week, I work my way through all the new bookmarks and creates searchable pdf:s of the ones I really want to archive.

Worth noting, since you are also using Instapaper: I’ve set up Instapaper to save not only all articles to Pinboard, but also my highlights and annotations. This creates separate entries in Pinboard for each highlight/annotation which also gets imported into DT, as separate html-documents. The benefit of this is that I both get the whole article, but also the passages that I’ve found most interesting as separate items. This helps a lot in retrieving information later on.

[BLUEFROG]

Worth noting, since you are also using Instapaper: I’ve set up Instapaper to save not only all articles to Pinboard, but also my highlights and annotations. This creates separate entries in Pinboard for each highlight/annotation which also gets imported into DT, as separate html-documents. The benefit of this is that I both get the whole article, but also the passages that I’ve found most interesting as separate items. This helps a lot in retrieving information later on.

@thoresson: Definitely worth noting. Thanks for sharing.