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In today's business environment, managing information efficiently is critical to team success. Sharing useful links and resources in an organized way can be a challenge, especially when everyone saves their references scatteredly.
The problem gets worse with bookmarks: interesting links that could benefit the entire organization are saved in each user’s browser and remain inaccessible to colleagues.
To address this issue, we designed and implemented an automation that connects Pinboard, Mattermost, and DokuWiki, enabling the team to collect and distribute relevant links more efficiently.
Automation implementation
Automation starts from Pinboard, an online bookmarking service. Pinboard lets you save interesting links to the cloud and organize them with custom labels, instead of storing them directly in your browser.
To ensure that the team's links were collected correctly, we agreed to use a specific tag: in our case, “qabiria”.
Getting the tag's RSS feed in Pinboard
Among the many features available, Pinboard generates an RSS feed for each tag.
A RSS feed is a system that allows you to automatically receive updates from a website without having to visit it. It works as a news channel that collects and displays the latest content on a page, such as articles, podcasts, or saved links, allowing you to read them via a feed reader or integrate them into other tools.
The feed generated by Pinboard provides access to saved links in a structured way. To get the RSS feed of the “qabiria” tag, the following URL is used, replacing [user-name] with the correct user name:
https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:[user-name]/t:qabiria/
This feed updates automatically whenever you add a new link with the specified label.
Integrating the RSS feed into DokuWiki
To centralize and facilitate access to links, we integrated the RSS feed into DokuWiki, the internal documentation platform used in Qabiria.
DokuWiki is a wiki-based documentation management system designed to be lightweight, easy to use, and database-free. It helps teams collaboratively create, organize, and edit information, with version control that records every change. Its simple syntax and wide range of extensions make it a flexible tool for documenting processes, sharing knowledge, and structuring information in an accessible way.
DokuWiki allows you to embed RSS feeds natively with the following syntax:
{{rss>https://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:[user-name]/t:qabiria/}}
If this line is added to a specific page in DokuWiki, such as one titled “To Read,” links saved in Pinboard with the tag “qabiria” will automatically appear, providing the team with an always-updated list of recommended resources.
Real-time notifications in Mattermost
To keep the team informed of newly added links, we also set up an integration with Mattermost, our internal communication tool.
Mattermost is a messaging and collaboration platform for teams, similar to Slack, but with a focus on privacy and personalization. It enables real-time communication through organized channels, direct messages, and integrations with other tools. Being open source, it can be installed on your own servers, offering greater control over company data and information security.
Using Make.com, we created a connection that monitors Pinboard's RSS feed and sends a notification to Mattermost's designated channel whenever a new link is added.
Finally, to provide more complete context, we added an additional step: an integration with ChatGPT that generates a short description of the shared link.
This way, each notification includes not only the title and link URL, but also a summary that helps the team quickly understand its relevance.
Benefits of integration
This automation offers multiple advantages:
- Efficiency: it eliminates the need to manually share links and ensures that all relevant resources are available to the team without additional effort.
- Centralization: it collects and stores all links in one accessible location, facilitating future reference and consultation.
- Improving collaboration: it keeps the team updated on useful resources, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
Conclusion
The integration of Pinboard, Mattermost and DokuWiki through this automation has significantly improved knowledge management within the company.
With solutions like this, companies improve their processes and ensure that the most relevant information is always accessible to everyone.
If you too want to improve efficiency and collaboration with innovative solutions, contact us to find out how we can help.
