I use the excellent, dependable Pinboard service for managing my bookmarks. A one-time fee gives you lifetime access to the service; and there is an API that has fostered an ecosystem of desktop and mobile apps that interact with the service. Of course, Safari can synchronize bookmarks among devices; but it doesn’t allow tagging. Since tagging is a major part of my workflow, Safari bookmarks don’t work for me.

So, here’s where pinboardspotlight.py comes in. It’s a relatively simple Python program that downloads your Pinboard bookmarks, writing them to local .webloc files and applying the tags you’ve used in the Pinboard metadata to the local files. Now you’re Pinboard bookmarks are searchable locally.

Usage

To use pinboardspotlight.py, you’ll first need to install the command line app tag here. Then you can download pinboardspotlight.py from my github repository.

Calling the script is just a matter of supplying at least the following arguments:

- `-u, --user`		Your Pinboard user name
- `-p, --password`	Your Pinboard password
- `-w, --webloc`	The path on your filesystem where the webloc files will be stored

Optionally, you can specify the path to the sqlite3 database that the script uses.

`-d, --database`	The path on your filesystem where the sqlite3 database is stored