The more I think about it, the more I believe that the links I bookmark everyday are an important dimension of my online life. They're mine to keep.

When Google Reader »integrated« several of its Reader's features into GooglePlus, my friend Jan and me made the switch to a self-hosted RSS Reader (tiny, tiny rss, I talked about the switch here).

It is an awesome product to manage incoming RSS content for personal reading. It also gives you the possibility to publish/share an outgoing RSS stream with the best articles from what came in.

However, we still missed the possibility to put any page we read on the web into the outgoing RSS stream. Also, Google Reader had a nicer widget to put the outgoing stream on a personal website. And finally, Google still had all our shared data. I have, with Jans help, solved all of these three concerns with a straightforward add-on to tiny, tiny rss (we call it gritttt-rss). It is all described in more detail on a dedicated website, with even a picture with arrows and everything:

The little widget in the right lower corner on this website now shows my "shared" outgoing RSS stream in the widget I made.

Why did I go to so much trouble? While doing this challenging project (it actually included solving many small web development challenges and was much fun, as well), I realised why:

It is not so much about sharing links, not in the first place, that is. I myself want to keep bookmarks of what I read each day. I believe that the links I bookmark everyday are an important dimension of my online life. I bookmark a couple links everyday, and years later I can look back and understand what I was interested in during certain times.

Unlike online services like Delicious or Pinboard, however, I host the list of bookmarked links myself - I really own that data. And the method (the gritttt-rss code) is open-source.