Introducing Pinry, a self-hostable Pinterest. | Hacker News Reader

Introducing Pinry, a self-hostable Pinterest.

overshard.github.com

203 pointsovershard50 comments

I'm getting into Pinterest, trying to figure out what the sharing, socializing, and marketing opportunities are over there. Some of those members have millions of followers. Amazing. It's like having your own private newspaper.

But heck if I want to spend my time creating yet more content for some other third-party to make money on. So I can kind of see what they're getting at here.

What I decided to do was create a blog just for new stuff I'd share on Pinterest. I post to my blog and then pin from my blog. ( shameless plug: http://i-heart.us/ Note this is mostly just Amazon affiliate stuff but I already have another blog dedicated to just interesting pictures http://caption-of-the-day.com)

I think if you could automate _that_ process, where instead of pinning you'd post on your own account and then pin, you'd get the best of both worlds. Having your site look and feel like Pinterest would be bonus points.

I like this idea a lot. To me having finer control over your own content is a much more important feature than nailing an exact Pinterest clone.

You can make money on Pinterest as well: http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-steve-amazon-spammer-....

I couldn't get Amazon referral links to work at first, but if you use amzn.to, your referral is preserved. :)

(I'm not saying you should spam the site, but it is possible to get credit for referring people from your pins.)

The guy in that article you cited turned out to be a liar. See the follow-up: http://www.dailydot.com/news/pinterest-scammer-hoax-controve...

Interesting, thanks. Maybe Pinterest just don't "sanitize" shorturls yet.

I consume a lot of stuff from Amazon, so I initially thought I'd just pin whatever I liked and use an affiliate link. That way if somebody else liked my image recommendation enough to chase it down over on Amazon, I'd get a small cut.

But Pinterest does not like you doing this. Somebody said they were stripping out your affiliate code and adding their own.

I thought about the 10 million ways around this, but at the end of the day I decided that if I controlled the content on my own site, I could do damn well what I wanted with it. Plus over many years it might start picking up search traffic. Who knows? And when the next whiz-bang super cool social site comes out, I still have all of my stuff in the same place.

I have no intention of spamming Pinterest, but if I'm taking time to participate and add my recommendation to some product, it kind of rubs me the wrong way that they would so directly take control like that.

They used to use Skimlinks - which convert any links (affiliate or not) to their affiliate links. It was in their TOS. I was happy with that, because they've got to make money somehow. Lots of sites do it. But the blogosphere hated it, and I think Pinterest stopped doing it. There have been threads on HN giving clear details about how to bypass it.

Could you also use a url shortener to hide your affiliate links? BTW does Facebook preserve Amazon affiliate links?

It works with amzn.to. Haven't really tried it with anything else; I just pinned an item that was available at Amazon, and I preferred to use my own referral on it. I don't intend to make a business out of posting on Pinterest.

Sidenote: You should update your wp install, 3.3.2 is out. chicky chicky boom boom.

"Because I don't like sharing."

I think you missed the point of Pinterest. This is to Pinterest what iPhoto is to Facebook.

But I'll be honest, I was first interested in Pinterest because I thought it would be a lovely bookmark aggregator. This does that pretty well from the look of it, but it's definitely a self-hosted image bookmarker with a Pinterest-esque interface, rather than a self-hosted curated web.

Might be splitting hairs over a title, but the difference is significant.

I think you missed the point of Pinterest.

If you like the point of Pinterest, use Pinterest. If you just like the look of Pinterest, you can use Pinry.

Pinterest has recently banned pro-Ana/Mia pins.

I could see something like Pinry being useful for creating communities that respect freedom of speech / information / image posting, so long as the content is not illegal.

A search for "thinsperation" shows they're not doing a very good job of it.

I know (many) people with anorexia. They are amazing at hiding stuff. (Fishing weight shot sewed into bras; heavier weight sewed into hair scrunchies. This made the weekly weigh-in easier to pass while still starving.)

I'm glad Pinterest has made the gesture, but they'll never win.

> a lovely bookmark aggregator

For certain definitions of lovely, consider http://pinboard.in/

Love pinboard. Has suited me very well for my bookmarking needs.

I still use pocket because their mobile app is pretty good at extracting text and storing it locally so I don't need a network, but there are a lot of things that pocket isn't good for, like bookmarking some tutorial or library I'd like to follow/integrate later. That's where pinboard has been very excellent. I was even able to hack together a python script and migrate most of my old pocket links over, and it already has a feature to scrape my new pockets.

And the best part about it being paid only is that I get some assurance that my bookmarks there will stay available.

If you're looking to curate bookmarks for self/private use you could try Springpad. It does a lot more than just bookmarks (photos, notes, tasks, etc.) but it surely could be used to just organize that kind of data.

Great to see this. I created Wookmark and it's a nice compliment that Pinry is inspired by it. Now let's see what I can learn from Pinry...

Phantomjs (http://phantomjs.org/) is a nice headless webkit browser that can be used to generate screenshots of entire pages (or clipped portions). It's got a nice API and a reasonably straightforward install. I've also heard good things about ghost.py (http://jeanphix.me/Ghost.py/). These might be handy if you can't find a good image.

I can't find it if there is one, but it'd be great to have an example site.

There is none and I don't plan on creating one. I understand why you want one but I don't want to bother with hosting a dynamic website that I would have to manage. (Rather spend the time improving the app itself.) I include a screenshot and an example is wookmark or pinterest's websites. It functions like those. If you want a demo of this exact app then clone it and run it. It's free and open source!

> I don't want to bother with hosting a dynamic website that I would have to manage.

Out of curiosity, after once deploying it, what're some responsibilities that entail from hosting a dynamic website vs. a static one? Isn't it basically a matter of writing (/copying a good one and retrofitting) a fabric script, perhaps doing just a few things with some Apache/nginx config files, and just putting it up? What exactly makes it more hands-on post-launch?

I had been under the impression that this process would not take more than a few hours by itself.

I also want an example page and dont want to have to install it on my server before even knowing the quality of the product... should you ever get around to it, a demo would help a lot. otherwise, the screenshot looks cool. happy coding!

Awesome! If I get some time I might hack this up into some type of self-hosted evernote thing. I just started using evernote and it's nice but most of my notes are pictures/sites and this looks to be a great fit.

Kudos!

That's actually partially what I'm trying to do! I mostly just bookmark a lot of random sites and images and wanted an quick-view Pinterest like interface to put on top of that. If you create some nice features please pull-request. I'll gladly take a look.

then you might like http://readle.com too.

I really like this, I'm looking forward to digging through the source and finding out how folks set up their django apps.

I came here to comment just this. I downloaded it for fun and was stoked to see manage.py! Interesting indeed to explore others' conventions. I particularly like settings as a module.

One thing I tend to avoid, however (of course this is just my personal taste) is templates in each sub-app. I feel like at that point there are just too many nested directories. I'd rather have one global templates dir for the entire project.

I often-times argue with myself over this. I do agree that one global template dir is nice but it makes the apps less copy-and-paste-able and I feel like Django apps were meant to be somewhat self-contained.

However, sometimes you have so many cross-links between apps in Django projects that taking out a single app to use in another project basically breaks most of the functionality.

There are big pros and cons for doing it either way.

How often do you take an app, drop it somewhere, and never modify it? I stick to "my way" because I always end up modifying the hell out of templates.

Very cool, I already adapted Pinry to a direct PHP/MySQL implementation, as I'm not a Django user (yet). Applying the new UI to http://www.myinfoq.com/ to make it easier to discover information about your interests and should help as a demo/reference site. Thanks overshard, hope I can contribute back to the community. @dugald3

You should do a one click deploy and charge subscription fees. Sort of like wordpress.

At first I thought this was to Pinterest what Yammer is to Twitter (i.e. a private ecosystem that companies can use, etc). But now I see that it is only for one person's images.

Actually it uses the built in Django auth system, it has a registration page and everything already. You can have multiple people with accounts posting stuff on here if you wanted to expand it to multiple people in a company.

I'll create an issue to expand in this direction a bit though, great idea!

EDIT: Issue created here https://github.com/overshard/pinry/issues/6

I have been getting a error when I attach a new pin IOError at /pins/new-pin/ /Users/User_Name/Documents/pinry/media/pins/pin exists and is not a directory.

Be sure you have a version of PIL that has support for the image type you are trying to save. Also be sure that pins/pin is a directory. As the error says it does not see it as such. I've only tested this under Ubuntu 12.04 though so it may be a bug, please report an Issue on GitHub...

At the very least, ~/Documents is non-standard. I would hope it's configurable.

That'll be where nikunjk installed pinry. Pinry saves the files into <pinry>/pins/pin.

If you don't like sharing, and don't want to self-host, there is also http://www.clipboard.com

Clipboard also allows you to clip almost arbitrary parts of web pages (text, images, embeds) with the style and most functionality preserved. See http://www.clipboard.com/site/ycombinator.com for examples of things clipped from Hacker News.

Disclaimer: I am the founder of Clipboard.com.

Clipboard is currently in invite mode only but you can sign on to Clipboard by going to www.clipboard.com/register and using the invite code "just4u".

also, http://pinboard.in, http://readle.com, http://delicious.com

pinboard and readle have private items as well, if you dont feel like "sharing". :)

Side note, these github templates look beautiful.

agree

Very nice work.

Can you put up a demo?

No, I rather not deal with hosting/curating a demo site for something I advertise as being "self-hosted" and work on developing the item itself. Look to wookmark or pinterest websites, it works very similar to them.

You can also clone it and have your own demo up and running very fast.

?_?

The code is BSD licensed, you can modify and distribute it as you wish.

https://github.com/overshard/pinry/blob/master/LICENSE

Not used to seeing it without a header. Thanks.

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