A Funkaoshi Production

Link Like This, Not Like This

   9 April 2010, late morning

When I first started this site I had a category for posts called interesting links. As the name suggests, this was the category I’d assign to posts that were about interesting links. The posts would show up on this site looking like a normal post, with a title, the date, etc. Generally these posts were in a style similar to how Kottke posts links now: they were just smaller blog posts about something I found on the net. One problem with this style was that there were plenty of times where I wanted to link to something without really saying anything more on the subject: some links are interesting without me having to explain why, or write more than a sentence about. So one day I sat down, mucked around with TextPattern, and switched to the style I have now. Lots of sites run their link logs like this. Two of note are Daring Fireball and Shawn Blanc.

If you use my site’s RSS feed, when you click on the title of a link-post you’re taken to the post I was linking to. I have an extra link tacked onto the bottom of the post (when viewed in a feed reader) that will take you to the post on my site about the link. The idea is that people can read the few sentences I have to say on a topic in their feed reader, and then move on to the real content. The only real reason people would want to visit my site rather than what i’m linking to is if they want to comment on my site about the link. I would say this is standard behaviour for a link log. Daring Fireball and Waxy.org link to sites in their RSS feeds in this manner. Shawn Blanc does not. Shawn Blanc is doing it wrong. His site is great though, so I keep reading anyway.

If you use keyboard short cuts when using your feed reader, i’m sure you feel my pain.

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