402: Bookmarks

CodePen Radio

Pins are dead!

Long live bookmarks!

Pins was never a good name for the feature we have on CodePen where you can mark a Pen or Collection to more quickly jump back to it from anywhere on the site. The word is too similar to "Pen" that it's just awkward, not to mention it's not exactly and obvious metaphor. A bookmark is a much more clear term and icon, so we decided to switch to it.

Switching the UI is kind of the easy part. It's kind of a cultural thing at CodePen, but when we make a change like this, we change it 100% through the entire code base, down to the database itself. In order to do that, we had to chunk it into stages so that those stages can roll out independently, but in order, to make it seamless.

Now that it's done, we were able to extend the functionality of Bookmarks a bit, such that bookmarking a template is extra useful. One place to see that is on the new Create page.

As an extra bit of history, the idea for Bookmarks came from Katie Kovalcin when we worked with Sparkbox for a redesign ages ago, then Klare Frake took the idea home.

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