I use kind of like my own personal Stack Overflow. I tag stuff with several (hopefully memorable) tags, and when I can't remember how to (whatever), I search and usually find an article which I thought was helpful enough at the time. Yup, I could google it too, but as you know, sometimes info is out of date, wrong, etc. I keep the good ones.

I also bookmark stuff I want to get back to; for instance, I do eventually want to start an SaaS, so I've got a lot of 'business', 'marketing', etc. links.

At work once, someone mentioned some particular technology and I said, "I think I have some links for that!" His office-mate promptly said, "You have a link for everything!" :-)

I have two use cases. The first is to keep track of interesting articles I find and plausibly want to refer back to in the future. A 3rd party browser extension and mobile app make saving very easy, and then I tag each item with a high-level category. This is also pretty painless, and brings a lot of value (otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful). An example is my 'long reads' tag https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:long-read/. The 'unread' feature is also useful here - I've got >10 long reads banked for when I'm looking for things to do.

The second is as a kind of mechanism to give myself permission to close a bunch of tabs every time they accumulate. Each is _obviously_ open for a good reason and I may want to read it at some point, so sticking it on pinboard is a nice way of shoving them elsewhere. I don't save everything - curation is important (in the same way as with tagging). Lots of what remains are things that may be useful for me in the future but are not immediately, like design guides https://pinboard.in/u:guyaglionby/t:design/. Some of these things I leave as 'unread'; others that feel more like reference material I mark as 'read' immediately so as not to have them in my to-read queue.

> otherwise you just have an unsorted collection of links - not helpful

Yeah I think this is my problem. I’m on iOS so I use Safari’s reading list feature to keep track of articles I want to read. But it’s just a dump, no organization, and after I read an article I don’t know what to “do” with it anymore so I just delete it.

I think I need to figure out a system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for the same things over and over again. Pinboard seems like it could help

> system where I actually refer back to things because I seem to google for the same things over and over again

Yep, this often frustratingly turns nothing up for me. Hence, Pinboard :)

I don't treat bookmarks as a list of sites. I treat them as a list of jumping-off points for any kind of resource whatsoever.

Everything I come across that I might want to be able to find my way back to goes into Pinboard as a bookmark.

The full-text indexing feature means it's my own personal search engine of (most things) I've ever seen. I imported my previous bookmarks, which go back to 1994.

Everything I come across that I will likely want to go back to and digest later goes into Pinboard as a bookmark set to 'unread'.

When I have some time to relax, catch up, and read, I open my list of unread bookmarks and work backwards. Or I skip back a month, or a year, or several. It's amazing what I'm reminded of. Sometimes I decide I don't care any more and delete or just keep links as bookmarks, but more often than not I'll go and read whatever it was I'd left as a gift for future me.

I don't use Pinboard (yet) but I have my own system of many thousands of bookmarks, and the reason is that I can't always remember stuff.

So if I see, say, a good online tool for checking an email for spam-like features, I might bookmark that with tags of 'email', 'spam', etc. Then if in future I don't need to Google "email spam tool" and find 1001 irrelevant things, I can just search my bookmarks instead and find that it was https://spamcheck.postmarkapp.com/ (I just did this very search as I couldn't remember what that tool was called).

Pretty much every valuable tool or site I've ever seen is organized in such a way that I can bring it up on a second's notice.

I also can bring up things I once thought were neat and that I've totally forgotten about just by searching for a tag.

I'm not much into tags, but Pinboard has a paid archiving upgrade (https://pinboard.in/upgrade/) that allows you to search within the archived full-text versions of your bookmarks. That's how I roll mostly.

I use Pinboard in combination with a Raspberry Pi (running Calibre + Mozilla Readability) as my Read Later service. Once per day the Raspberry Pi fetches unread bookmarks from Pinboard and compiles an eBook that is then sent wirelessly to my Kindle. This has replaced Instapaper/Pocket for me. Thanks to Mozilla Readability the text/image extraction works in most cases better than other Read Later services + I like having all my bookmarks in one place (and one service less to pay money for!). I've written a blog post about it and open-sourced all my work: https://christianhans.info/12791/running-your-own-read-later...

Mostly I save ideas for projects or personal development things that I need to do a more "deep read" of (this also allows me to tag it for that purpose, and when I want to go back to something I've worked on I can find references I've used for specific projects that I may not have saved elsewhere), things I've read that I might want to reference later/thought was a good read or interesting and tag it with the relevant stuff. Mostly I just use it as an instapaper backup, where I have it automatically save my Archived stories and it tags it with a "tagme" tag that I go through once a week or so.