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About a year ago, I experimented with this. I was collecting links throughout the month and then posted an article with all the links accompanied by a “personal

by jmmv 2y ago

About a year ago, I experimented with this. I was collecting links throughout the month and then posted an article with all the links accompanied by a “personal comment” for each. I kept up with that for about 5 months and then abandoned the effort. It was a lot of work and it didn’t feel very rewarding. The writing itself wasn’t as fun as crafting an article and the resulting posts didn’t get any traction. Wondering how others that do this feel, and whether blog readers might see these types of entries as “blog spam” or not.

rednafi 2y ago
I have a separate section in my blog that’s outside of the RSS feed to house links. I’ve adopted an even simpler approach: - Each year gets a new page to list links, activities I’ve done, books I’ve read, and talks I’ve grokked [^1] - The pages are listed under the feed section [^2] For me, the idea isn’t about who reads them or not, but rather to have a chronological record of some of my online activities. Reviewing them at the end of the year gives me a sense of accomplishment that I love. It’s outside RSS and doesn’t clutter the front page of the site. So no spamming there. [^1]: https://rednafi.com/feed/2025/ https://rednafi.com/feed/2025/ [^2]: https://rednafi.com/feed/ https://rednafi.com/feed/
simonw 2y ago
Sounds to me like a common Substack newsletter format - a monthly collection of links with commentary. I get a decent amount of traction with my blog but it's still fundamentally for me: I run searches on it multiple times a day, it's effectively public bookmarks.
imtringued 2y ago
I'm not sure I agree with simonw's approach either. The goal of a link blog, that is meant to be useful to others, is to provide a highly curated collection of potentially difficult to find resources centering around a big theme or topic all in one place. It would be very similar to an "awesome list" but with personal notes and summaries of why you think the articles, books, papers, blog posts, you have linked are relevant to the overarching theme. The optimal blog structure would probably not even be a blog post per link, but rather a blog post per topic that gets updated as you find more relevant resources.
- simonw 2y ago
  I don't like that model. That's effectively an awesome list with some extra notes, and I've found surprisingly little value from awesome lists. The reason a link blog is valuable is that it emphasizes what is NEW in a space - maybe not new to the internet as a whole, but new to the explorations of the person running the blog. It's not "useful links about SQLite", it's "my personal exploration of the SQLite database over time". That's why I like tags so much. Here's that page for SQLite, going all the way back to when I first learned about it 21 years ago: https://simonwillison.net/tags/sqlite/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/sqlite/ I have over 5,000 more pages like that, each is effectively a miniature link blog in its own right. Tag pages become an important first class artifact of the blog itself. The date is also important for links because links rot - and information falls out of date. Knowing that I found a resource valuable in 2019 is important context!

by jmmv 2y ago

rednafi 2y ago

I have a separate section in my blog that’s outside of the RSS feed to house links. I’ve adopted an even simpler approach: - Each year gets a new page to list links, activities I’ve done, books I’ve read, and talks I’ve grokked [^1] - The pages are listed under the feed section [^2] For me, the idea isn’t about who reads them or not, but rather to have a chronological record of some of my online activities. Reviewing them at the end of the year gives me a sense of accomplishment that I love. It’s outside RSS and doesn’t clutter the front page of the site. So no spamming there. [^1]: https://rednafi.com/feed/2025/ https://rednafi.com/feed/2025/ [^2]: https://rednafi.com/feed/ https://rednafi.com/feed/

simonw 2y ago

Sounds to me like a common Substack newsletter format - a monthly collection of links with commentary. I get a decent amount of traction with my blog but it's still fundamentally for me: I run searches on it multiple times a day, it's effectively public bookmarks.

imtringued 2y ago

I'm not sure I agree with simonw's approach either. The goal of a link blog, that is meant to be useful to others, is to provide a highly curated collection of potentially difficult to find resources centering around a big theme or topic all in one place. It would be very similar to an "awesome list" but with personal notes and summaries of why you think the articles, books, papers, blog posts, you have linked are relevant to the overarching theme. The optimal blog structure would probably not even be a blog post per link, but rather a blog post per topic that gets updated as you find more relevant resources.

simonw 2y ago
I don't like that model. That's effectively an awesome list with some extra notes, and I've found surprisingly little value from awesome lists. The reason a link blog is valuable is that it emphasizes what is NEW in a space - maybe not new to the internet as a whole, but new to the explorations of the person running the blog. It's not "useful links about SQLite", it's "my personal exploration of the SQLite database over time". That's why I like tags so much. Here's that page for SQLite, going all the way back to when I first learned about it 21 years ago: https://simonwillison.net/tags/sqlite/ https://simonwillison.net/tags/sqlite/ I have over 5,000 more pages like that, each is effectively a miniature link blog in its own right. Tag pages become an important first class artifact of the blog itself. The date is also important for links because links rot - and information falls out of date. Knowing that I found a resource valuable in 2019 is important context!