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Run a Link Blog From Your Bookmarks: Public Profiles and RSS

Cowpin

Cowpin

10/16/2026

#link-blog #rss #public-profile #pinboard #how-to
Run a Link Blog From Your Bookmarks: Public Profiles and RSS

Some of the best corners of the web are still link blogs: one person, a steady stream of interesting links, a sentence or two on why each one matters. Pinboard users have been doing this quietly for years with a public profile and an RSS feed that friends, colleagues and feed readers subscribe to.

The nice thing about a link blog is that you don't need to write one. You already save links. A link blog is just the public slice of your bookmarks, given a stable address and a feed. This guide shows how to set that up in Cowpin, what gets published (and what never does), and a few habits that make a link blog worth following.

The short version

  1. Pick a username and turn on your public profile.
  2. Mark the bookmarks you want to share as public. Everything else stays private.
  3. Share cowpin.com/u/yourname and its RSS feed. Add per-tag feeds if you write about more than one topic.

That's it. There's no separate publishing step: saving a public bookmark is publishing it.

Step 1: Turn on your public profile

Go to Settings → Account → Bookmarks → Public profile. You'll see three fields:

  • Username. This becomes your address: cowpin.com/u/yourname. Lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, 2–32 characters. Pick something you're happy to keep, since it ends up in other people's feed readers.
  • Bio. Up to 280 characters. One line on what you link to is plenty ("Distributed systems, typography, and the occasional bread recipe").
  • Show my public bookmarks. The switch that actually makes the page live.

Save, and your profile page exists. The page also gives search engines a clean title, description and structured profile data, so your name and bio show up properly when someone shares the link.

Step 2: Decide what's public (the default is: nothing)

Cowpin treats new saves as private by default. A public profile doesn't change that. It only shows bookmarks you've explicitly marked public. So turning the profile on doesn't suddenly expose your reading history.

To publish a link, mark that bookmark public when you save it or later from the bookmark itself. If you'd rather share most of what you save, you can turn off Private by default in the same settings page and mark the occasional bookmark private instead. Pick whichever default matches how you actually save.

A few guarantees worth knowing:

  • Private bookmarks never appear on the profile page or in any feed.
  • Archived bookmarks are left out of the public page and feeds too.
  • Privacy lock is the big red switch. Turn it on and every bookmark is forced private, your public profile is hidden, and public saves are blocked. Use it if you change your mind, take a break, or just want to be certain. Your library stays intact. It just stops being visible.

We wrote more about this in who can see your saved links.

Step 3: Share the page and the feeds

Your link blog has three public surfaces:

The profile page. cowpin.com/u/yourname shows your public bookmarks newest-first, with titles, your descriptions and tags. Click any tag to filter, and visitors can do the same.

The main RSS feed. Every profile has a feed at cowpin.com/u/yourname/feed.rss (there's an RSS button on the page). It carries your 50 most recent public bookmarks, with each one's title, link, description and tags. Paste it into any feed reader, such as NetNewsWire, Feedly, Inoreader or Miniflux, and new public saves show up automatically.

Per-tag pages and feeds. If you link about several unrelated things, readers rarely want all of them. Each tag gets its own page at cowpin.com/u/yourname/t/tagname with its own feed, and filtering by a tag on your profile shows a tag RSS link. Someone who only cares about your #rust links can subscribe to just those.

Cowpin users who are signed in also get a Subscribe button on your profile, so they can follow you without a feed reader.

The mechanics are the easy part. Here's what separates a feed people keep from one they mute after a week.

Write the description

Your bookmark's description becomes the body of the feed item. A bare URL is a bookmark. A URL plus "The clearest explanation of CRDTs I've read; skip to the second diagram" is a recommendation. One sentence is enough. It's the reason people subscribe to a person rather than an algorithm.

Use a small, stable set of public tags

Tags double as your link blog's sections and as per-topic feeds. That works best when public tags are few and consistent: design, rust, cooking, not design, Design, ui-design and design-stuff. Your private tags can be as messy as you like. Only the public ones need to be tidy, because they're someone else's navigation.

Publish at your natural pace

There's no schedule to keep. A feed reader doesn't care whether you post three links a day or three a month. What readers notice is quality per item, so leaving something private is often the right call.

Link blogs age badly when the pages they point to disappear. Cowpin keeps a full-text archive of what you save, so even if a linked page goes offline, your copy of what it said survives in your library. (Why that matters: link rot.)

Coming from Pinboard?

If you already ran a public Pinboard profile, the model will feel familiar: public and private bookmarks, a profile page, tag pages, RSS per user and per tag. The Pinboard import keeps each bookmark's privacy setting, along with its tags and read-later status. So bookmarks that were public on Pinboard come over public, and the ones you kept private stay private. Set a username, flip the profile on, and your link blog is back with its history intact.

The same goes for Pocket or Instapaper exports. Import, then make public the handful of links you actually want to share.

A link blog that lives inside someone else's platform can disappear when that platform does. We've written about that graveyard. That's why the parts that matter here are portable. Your feed is standard RSS that any reader understands. Your whole library, public and private, exports to Markdown, Obsidian, Notion or Pinboard-compatible formats whenever you want. And the Pinboard-compatible API means your existing scripts keep working.

Cowpin is free while we find our first users. Import your bookmarks from Pinboard, Pocket, Instapaper or your browser, pick a username, and mark your first public link. Your feed is live the moment you do.