Jamie Thingelstad

Hot Bagels Abroad, so good. Nobody does bagels like New Jersey!

Great dinner at Nemea Greek Taverna.

It’s February and our entire summer is pretty much scheduled out. Not sure if I’m excited or depressed by this.

Family field trip to Big Lake on the Northstar Train. We talked to the conductor at the end and found out it was his last day before retiring. I asked if they would mind a photo with Tyler and we’re happy to do that.

Enjoyed reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance.

Watched Brooklyn tonight.

We went to Tinto Cocina tonight.

I’ve been using Pinboard to store bookmarks for years and have always been very happy with it. I’ve got over 8,000 bookmarks in Pinboard and routinely send links into it nearly every day.

Pinboard is a super fast website, but I’ve wanted a solid Mac application to use with it as well. I had tried Thumbtack but it just never really worked for me. It is probably great for others. When I was reading Brett Terpstra’s 2015 Top Mac Apps he linked to Spillo as his preferred Pinboard client. Brett knows his stuff so I pinned Spillo and decided to check it out.

First off Spillo has a very comfortable UI. It reminds me of an RSS reader or email application with a simple 3-column layout. It provides the key Pinboard views of your own bookmarks (all, unread, untagged, starred, etc) and also includes the Community features of Pinboard like Network and Popular. I’m a big fan of Pinboard’s Popular list. That is where I discover most new things.

Spillo also adds Collections which are search based and can include any criteria like tag, unread status even where the link came from. I like this since I have a workflow around videos from conferences that I want to watch. I don’t think of those as normal unread items since they take a lot more time. So I have a “Videos to watch” collection that brings these together real nice.

Overall I really like Spillo and I’m hopeful that the developer behind it is going to continue to extend it. I like that the focus is on a Mac client and there isn’t a plan for Spillo for iOS. I already use Pinner for Pinboard on my iPhone and it works great. Also, if you are not using Pinboard and you routinely like to bookmark things you should give it a look.

I’ve been using Spillo for about a week now and am finding it really great. Here is a quick wish list though that I would love to see added.

1. Help with URL redirects. If you click on a bookmark in Spillo it shows the web page, great. However, if when Spillo requests the webpage it is sent a 301 redirect request I would like Spillo to prompt me that the website has permanently moved the “old URL” to a “new URL” and ask if I would like to update my bookmark. Personally I sort of wish Pinboard did this on the server side, but it would be great if Spillo prompted this and let me update my URL’s as needed, before they become dead.

2. Add “nots” to Collection searches. Currently a URL can “contain” but not “does not contain” a string. A date can be “is in the last” period of time, but not “not in the last” period of time. Tag searched can be “any” or “all”, but you cannot do “not”.

3. Power search on titles. This may be something Pinboard would have to support, but I’d love to be able to pass regex patterns for text searches. Just to highlight a use case for this, I’d like a Collection of Github projects I’ve pinned. That is easy with “URL contains github.com”. But, then I’m also capturing Github blog posts which I can’t currently exclude from that collection.

4. Create collection from tag browser. You can shift click multiple tags in the tag browser, would be nice to then right-click and have “Create collection…”.

5. Drag Community links into my links. It’s slick how you can drag a bookmark onto the tag list to add tags. It would be cool to take a bookmark you from Popular and drag it into Public or All to add it to your bookmarks. Equally drag to Unread or Private to add it as unread or private respectively. Right now you have to repin the bookmark. This would be similar to the Pinboard websites “copy to mine…” capability. When doing this it would be nice to add the “from:popular” attribution.

6. Show whole description. Right now you can only have “None” or 1, 2 or 3 lines displayed of the description. I’d like an option for “All”.

7. Date part searches. Right now the date searches are only date searched. I’d like to search on date parts. Examples would be “Bookmarks added on Saturday or Sunday”, “Bookmarks added in 2010”, “Bookmarks added after 6pm and before 6am”.

Tag management in general is an area where I continue to hope for an application like Spillo to help out even more.

1. Spillo already shows the number of times a tag has been used, would be nice to see the date it was last used as well.

2. It would be nice in tag browser to be able to drop one tag onto another to merge them together (into the one that was dropped on).

3. Similar to above, select any number of tags and allow a “Merge…” capability.

4. Allow filtering of tags to only show tags used some number of times or less. Similar with show me tags not used in the last number of months or years.