Using DEVONthink as a Bookmark Manager

For several years now, I’ve been using Pinboard to collect and manage bookmarks, and it has worked very well for me. However, while Pinboard itself is great, the various third-party apps I’ve used with it have been merely okay at best.

But since the big upgrade to both DEVONthink for the Mac and DEVONthink To Go for iPad and iPhone, which I mentioned recently, I’ve started re-evaluating my systems.

This morning, I successfully imported all my Pinboard bookmarks into DEVONthink using this AppleScript plus some editing, thanks to this thread over on the DEVONtechnologies Community Forums. All the tags were retained, which will really help with organisation, something that DEVONthink excels at.

My Pinboard subscription isn’t due to expire until next year. While I’ve used some of the social features in the past, such as the Network and Popular feeds, those aren’t necessarily dependent on my having a Pinboard account. If I were still a Twitter user, that might sway me to keep using Pinboard, but that ship sailed a long time ago.

Meanwhile, DEVONthink has the ability to produce a clutter-free WebArchive (or Markdown) version of web pages, so I can save the content of articles then highlight parts that I may want to write about or do further research on. Pinboard can do page archival as well, but that is an optional (and paid) extra.

So I think it’s fair to say that I’m sold now on using DEVONthink as a bookmark manager. My data can be accessed offline, for starters, and searching is much faster. But the best part is that I can use its AI classification system to find related items, again without the need for internet access or sending my data to someone else’s servers. Heady stuff!