10 ms·

Build a link blog like Simon Willison

236 points by xuanwo 2y ago

tomrod 2y ago
I'm inspired. My tiny link blog, Roderick.dev, has languished for a long time as I've thought through the right voice. To the sharing of interesting things and thoughts.
xk3 2y ago
If I feel like I truly learned something novel I'll add a link here: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/knowledge.list https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/kno...
- m3kw9 2y ago
  This is like assembly code for link blog
- tr3ntg 2y ago
  And this link of yours counts as something "truly novel"? > https://youtu.be/Of9yvKINITg https://youtu.be/Of9yvKINITg # 10 hours of silence occasionally broken up by the Taco bell Bong I'm joking, this is really funny, and many of your links are very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing.
jszymborski 2y ago
I tend to suffer from scope creep in my blogs. "Oh, I found a quicker way to compute X, lets write a blog about it" becomes "I should write a library, write docs, run extensive comparatives, then publish it". I've been getting better at fighting that temptation, but I still suck at it. Setting deadlines for blog posts usually helps me focus my efforts.
- edoceo 2y ago
  For these things, I use the Pomodoro method. I wanna do the thing, it's not critical, let's grind it for 30 minutes, set a timer, then (the hard part) stop
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  I had a similar problem with sonnet.io (some articles taking weeks to get done). So, I started untested (https://untested.sonnet.io https://untested.sonnet.io) where for 111 days no matter what I'd share a post per day. Here's the first post: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/111 https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/111 Consistency really helps - there are posts that I had spent weeks on and barely anyone read them in the first place. Then, once I started posting smaller, messier notes almost daily, both the traffic (not that important to me) and the amount of interesting interactions with people (very important to me) went up by 100x. Another way in which I avoided yak shaving/scope creep was to ditch my own site and rely on Obsidian Publish (I went back to my own solution after a year, as a reward for mostly sticking to the plan)
- jakevoytko 2y ago
  I used to have the problem where all of my posts would be 2000-3000 words, or more likely I would never finish them. So I started a newsletter in November. I committed to publishing every Monday and Thursday. Furthermore, since I have a wife and a toddler, I basically have about 4-5 hours to work on every post. The regular schedule has helped me get over my perfectionism, aggressively cut scope, and ship on time.
eamag 2y ago
Why not combine links in one monthly post similar to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025 https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025 I personally prefer this format (https://eamag.me/2025/Links-For-January-2025 https://eamag.me/2025/Links-For-January-2025) and you can post single links on social media instead no?
- xuanwo 2y ago
  Some quick ideas: - Multiple links in the same post make it difficult to organize discussions and thoughts. - Monthly posts require extra effort to maintain and update, which didn't align with our initial goal of sharing more casually and recording our thoughts in real time. - Modern static site generators support maintaining archive pages by month, so we no longer need to do it manually. Hoping those ideas make sense to you.
- purist33 2y ago
  Like the other reply said, a monthly link blog would be too much. I find myself ignoring a lot of those links of the month posts because it covers too many topics and I end up not liking most of it. Whereas one which has small commentary on a single link is great for me, since if i like the commentary enough, I would add the link to my read later.
- MattSayar 2y ago
  I've settled on posting interesting links to BlueSky and then I put a Bsky sidebar on my site[0]. It's a win-win; I have the small links+comments "on" my site, but the longer stuff that gets posted to RSS/newsletter to my site proper. [0] https://mattsayar.com https://mattsayar.com
- simonw 2y ago
  Depends on how much commentary you are adding. If more than a sentence it's worth having a separate page so that other people can link to what you said! My link blog entries are often quite long: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark
- rcarmo 2y ago
simonw 2y ago
I love how this post is an exact implementation of my advice on link blogging (add some personal commentary, quote liberally) - applied to my article about link blogging. Very meta. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
- xuanwo 2y ago
  Wow, thank you for this comment and for continuously sharing!
- ianhawes 2y ago
  Meta would be blogging about this post.
  - m3kw9 2y ago
    I call it recursion
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - simonw 2y ago
    ... https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/4/build-a-link-blog/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/4/build-a-link-blog/
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  This... might be what I need to do honestly. I've thought about a good way to save some links I find on HN, and its painful to go back through pages. Heck, sometimes I lose my own comments. A blog might just be the way to regain access to lost content from HN.
  - oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    Sounds like you might want a good bookmarking service. Pinboard used to be great. I still use it, but I'm not sure what it's like for new signups. I'm also in the process of migrating that data to localhost with some added scripts because it feels like I should own that data and... yeah, the aforementioned upheaval.
sorcercode 2y ago
Love this approach. For the Hugo blog users, my theme https://github.com/kaushikgopal/henry-hugo https://github.com/kaushikgopal/henry-hugo makes this style of blogging easy. Just add external link in the yaml header and it'll be marked up as a "link" style post
m3kw9 2y ago
Let the era of the link blog begin
rednafi 2y ago
Cool stuff. I also did something similar recently. Didn’t want to maintain a dynamic site just for this, so I took the least tech-savvy option. Added a new section to my blog that lists one page per year. Each page lists all my entries in reverse chronological order. Wrote about it here[1]. [1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/ https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/
brianzelip 2y ago
Great idea! Viewing source is a big reason I visit.
jjude 2y ago
I created a new category "/cpn/" (stands for commonlog) and posting links with my understanding. You can see them here: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/ https://www.jjude.com/cpn/ In fact, I also posted about Simon's post: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/informal-guidelines-for-running-a-link-blog/ https://www.jjude.com/cpn/informal-guidelines-for-running-a-... As he says, having a link blog is a "low stakes, high value" activity. More people should carry it out.
sodimel 2y ago
Thanks for this interesting article! I added it to my sharing link service (kinda like a link blog, I think): https://links.l3m.in/en/ https://links.l3m.in/en/
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
I’ve seen Simon’s blog suddenly posted on the front page nearly daily. Did something change recently that it became more popular?
- rcarmo 2y ago
  He's been supplying us with very regular updates on LLM-related topics, which is very much in vogue these days.
- simonw 2y ago
  I think it's just a fluke. You'll notice that I didn't submit any of the recent links myself - I don't tend to submit stuff from my link blog, I only submit my longer-form writing. Here's everything from my domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net A few of my recent self-submissions went nowhere, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810520 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461073 for example.
be_erik 2y ago
My link blog is just an rss feed. It's immensely helpful. I can feed the articles into LLMs so they can be tagged and summarized and I always have a copy (no bitrot thanks to monolith: https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith) https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml
samim 2y ago
I use my homebrew CMS for this called flow https://github.com/samim23/flow https://github.com/samim23/flow A lightweight static site generator with built-in CMS that creates linkblog-style content feeds.
yawnxyz 2y ago
I built a link blog system for myself that made it very very easy to just write new Notion pages and they'll just be on the site... except there's some kind of quicksand that prevents me from doing that on a regular basis. I really need to get that out of my head
pknerd 2y ago
Never understood how he get time to do so many things. He is very productive
peiskos 2y ago
If anyone has other interesting link blogs, do share them here
smusamashah 2y ago
Suggestion: Add waybackmachine/archive URL for each of the link that you blog about. Archive it if it's not there already.
- be_erik 2y ago
  This is such an important task. The web is constantly moving, we have to protect against bitrot. https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder is great for this purpose.
seafoamteal 2y ago
I've been considering doing this as well, if only for me to engage better with the things I read.
robschmidt90 2y ago
It seems like simon started a trend :) I implemented this feature on my blog a couple of weeks ago. I view it as the equivalent of a retweet, only that I own the content. If someone wants to subscribe, they can follow the respective rss feed. Maybe in the future I automatically push the updates to mastodon/bluesky/etc. feed section: https://staticnotes.org/feed/ https://staticnotes.org/feed/ rss feed: https://staticnotes.org/feed.xml https://staticnotes.org/feed.xml
throwaway_20357 2y ago
I would say "link blogging" is how weblogs started: Relatively short logs of your accomplishments or mysteries you had solved that day or just musings about one's recent discoveries on the web published on the web. It was an answer to more static "personal websites" where any new article had to justify its existence by meeting a certain threshold of novelty and newsworthiness. Weblogs got shorter and shorter, Tumblr started, then some went on to this new thing called Twitter.
dave333 2y ago
All blogs should have an RSS feed - I wasn't able to find one on Simon Willison's blog. I find the page format hard to read - a mass of text studded with links - it would benefit from more typographic structure - headings and so on.
- simonw 2y ago
  My feed is linked from the orange feed icon at the top right of the homepage, and also from the Subscribe section linked from each page which takes you to this: https://simonwillison.net/about/#subscribe https://simonwillison.net/about/#subscribe Are you using a screen reader or some other non-standard browser?
mrcsharp 2y ago
This is almost like reaction videos on YouTube but done properly by adding insightful commentary along the way. I can see a trend like this in the blogosphere being beneficial for everyone involved specially the readers.
zoogeny 2y ago
I've recently been wondering if a video is even better than a blog. We're at the point now where I can reasonably keep large numbers of video/text recorded from OBS in S3, run my own speech-to-text, I can cram it all into a SQLite DB, wrap it in a web front-end and then serve it all from cloudfront or wherever. There is obviously benefit in organizing thoughts using essays as a tool, but if you just want a record of your quick thoughts I almost think screen-capture + webcam + spoken word might be a decent option. Literally use OBS to record your 1-hour (or 4 hours) per day HN habit and keep it for prosperity.
- bthallplz 2y ago
  Somewhat similarly, I've started recording myself talking about various things and then using a speech to text program to transcribe it for me. It just helps me get my thoughts out a bit more fluidly than if I waited for when I can write them down (which then carries with it a temptation to edit as I record). I'll later on clean up the thoughts, though, not just serve them unedited in some way unless it was a really clean take on a topic - trying to be respectful of the audience's time. I do think you're onto something, though, with the idea about using screen recordings as a means of capturing your reactions and thoughts regarding some matter that can be shown visually. I think I'll be doing that soon, but with some editing to the video.
  - zoogeny 2y ago
    One thing I was considering in relation to this thought is that many people have written books using stenographers or secretaries. Many other books are edited compilations of lectures or speeches. That is the kind of thing I would normally consider for a CEO or President because the idea of having a secretary whose entire job is to write out your notes is a luxury most can't afford. We are literally at a point in time where we could dictate to a LLM and then get it to turn it into a book for us (if we so desired). It may not be perfect today, but it won't take long at the pace we are improving.
rook1e_dev 2y ago
https://github.com/usememos/memos https://github.com/usememos/memos is perfect for using as a link blog

236 points by xuanwo 2y ago

I'm inspired. My tiny link blog, Roderick.dev, has languished for a long time as I've thought through the right voice. To the sharing of interesting things and thoughts.

xk3 2y ago

If I feel like I truly learned something novel I'll add a link here: https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/knowledge.list https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/kno...

m3kw9 2y ago
This is like assembly code for link blog
tr3ntg 2y ago
And this link of yours counts as something "truly novel"? > https://youtu.be/Of9yvKINITg https://youtu.be/Of9yvKINITg # 10 hours of silence occasionally broken up by the Taco bell Bong I'm joking, this is really funny, and many of your links are very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing.

jszymborski 2y ago

I tend to suffer from scope creep in my blogs. "Oh, I found a quicker way to compute X, lets write a blog about it" becomes "I should write a library, write docs, run extensive comparatives, then publish it". I've been getting better at fighting that temptation, but I still suck at it. Setting deadlines for blog posts usually helps me focus my efforts.

edoceo 2y ago
For these things, I use the Pomodoro method. I wanna do the thing, it's not critical, let's grind it for 30 minutes, set a timer, then (the hard part) stop
rpastuszak 2y ago
I had a similar problem with sonnet.io (some articles taking weeks to get done). So, I started untested (https://untested.sonnet.io https://untested.sonnet.io) where for 111 days no matter what I'd share a post per day. Here's the first post: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/111 https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/111 Consistency really helps - there are posts that I had spent weeks on and barely anyone read them in the first place. Then, once I started posting smaller, messier notes almost daily, both the traffic (not that important to me) and the amount of interesting interactions with people (very important to me) went up by 100x. Another way in which I avoided yak shaving/scope creep was to ditch my own site and rely on Obsidian Publish (I went back to my own solution after a year, as a reward for mostly sticking to the plan)
jakevoytko 2y ago
I used to have the problem where all of my posts would be 2000-3000 words, or more likely I would never finish them. So I started a newsletter in November. I committed to publishing every Monday and Thursday. Furthermore, since I have a wife and a toddler, I basically have about 4-5 hours to work on every post. The regular schedule has helped me get over my perfectionism, aggressively cut scope, and ship on time.

eamag 2y ago

Why not combine links in one monthly post similar to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025 https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025 I personally prefer this format (https://eamag.me/2025/Links-For-January-2025 https://eamag.me/2025/Links-For-January-2025) and you can post single links on social media instead no?

xuanwo 2y ago
Some quick ideas: - Multiple links in the same post make it difficult to organize discussions and thoughts. - Monthly posts require extra effort to maintain and update, which didn't align with our initial goal of sharing more casually and recording our thoughts in real time. - Modern static site generators support maintaining archive pages by month, so we no longer need to do it manually. Hoping those ideas make sense to you.
purist33 2y ago
Like the other reply said, a monthly link blog would be too much. I find myself ignoring a lot of those links of the month posts because it covers too many topics and I end up not liking most of it. Whereas one which has small commentary on a single link is great for me, since if i like the commentary enough, I would add the link to my read later.
MattSayar 2y ago
I've settled on posting interesting links to BlueSky and then I put a Bsky sidebar on my site[0]. It's a win-win; I have the small links+comments "on" my site, but the longer stuff that gets posted to RSS/newsletter to my site proper. [0] https://mattsayar.com https://mattsayar.com
simonw 2y ago
Depends on how much commentary you are adding. If more than a sentence it's worth having a separate page so that other people can link to what you said! My link blog entries are often quite long: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark
rcarmo 2y ago

simonw 2y ago

I love how this post is an exact implementation of my advice on link blogging (add some personal commentary, quote liberally) - applied to my article about link blogging. Very meta. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/ https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/

xuanwo 2y ago
Wow, thank you for this comment and for continuously sharing!
ianhawes 2y ago
Meta would be blogging about this post.
- m3kw9 2y ago
  I call it recursion
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- simonw 2y ago
  ... https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/4/build-a-link-blog/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Feb/4/build-a-link-blog/
giancarlostoro 2y ago
This... might be what I need to do honestly. I've thought about a good way to save some links I find on HN, and its painful to go back through pages. Heck, sometimes I lose my own comments. A blog might just be the way to regain access to lost content from HN.
- oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
  Sounds like you might want a good bookmarking service. Pinboard used to be great. I still use it, but I'm not sure what it's like for new signups. I'm also in the process of migrating that data to localhost with some added scripts because it feels like I should own that data and... yeah, the aforementioned upheaval.

sorcercode 2y ago

Love this approach. For the Hugo blog users, my theme https://github.com/kaushikgopal/henry-hugo https://github.com/kaushikgopal/henry-hugo makes this style of blogging easy. Just add external link in the yaml header and it'll be marked up as a "link" style post

m3kw9 2y ago

Let the era of the link blog begin

rednafi 2y ago

Cool stuff. I also did something similar recently. Didn’t want to maintain a dynamic site just for this, so I took the least tech-savvy option. Added a new section to my blog that lists one page per year. Each page lists all my entries in reverse chronological order. Wrote about it here[1]. [1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/ https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/

brianzelip 2y ago

Great idea! Viewing source is a big reason I visit.

jjude 2y ago

I created a new category "/cpn/" (stands for commonlog) and posting links with my understanding. You can see them here: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/ https://www.jjude.com/cpn/ In fact, I also posted about Simon's post: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/informal-guidelines-for-running-a-link-blog/ https://www.jjude.com/cpn/informal-guidelines-for-running-a-... As he says, having a link blog is a "low stakes, high value" activity. More people should carry it out.

sodimel 2y ago

Thanks for this interesting article! I added it to my sharing link service (kinda like a link blog, I think): https://links.l3m.in/en/ https://links.l3m.in/en/

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

I’ve seen Simon’s blog suddenly posted on the front page nearly daily. Did something change recently that it became more popular?

rcarmo 2y ago
He's been supplying us with very regular updates on LLM-related topics, which is very much in vogue these days.
simonw 2y ago
I think it's just a fluke. You'll notice that I didn't submit any of the recent links myself - I don't tend to submit stuff from my link blog, I only submit my longer-form writing. Here's everything from my domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net A few of my recent self-submissions went nowhere, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810520 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461073 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461073 for example.

be_erik 2y ago

My link blog is just an rss feed. It's immensely helpful. I can feed the articles into LLMs so they can be tagged and summarized and I always have a copy (no bitrot thanks to monolith: https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith) https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml

samim 2y ago

I use my homebrew CMS for this called flow https://github.com/samim23/flow https://github.com/samim23/flow A lightweight static site generator with built-in CMS that creates linkblog-style content feeds.

yawnxyz 2y ago

I built a link blog system for myself that made it very very easy to just write new Notion pages and they'll just be on the site... except there's some kind of quicksand that prevents me from doing that on a regular basis. I really need to get that out of my head

pknerd 2y ago

Never understood how he get time to do so many things. He is very productive

peiskos 2y ago

If anyone has other interesting link blogs, do share them here

smusamashah 2y ago

Suggestion: Add waybackmachine/archive URL for each of the link that you blog about. Archive it if it's not there already.

be_erik 2y ago
This is such an important task. The web is constantly moving, we have to protect against bitrot. https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder is great for this purpose.

seafoamteal 2y ago

I've been considering doing this as well, if only for me to engage better with the things I read.

robschmidt90 2y ago

It seems like simon started a trend :) I implemented this feature on my blog a couple of weeks ago. I view it as the equivalent of a retweet, only that I own the content. If someone wants to subscribe, they can follow the respective rss feed. Maybe in the future I automatically push the updates to mastodon/bluesky/etc. feed section: https://staticnotes.org/feed/ https://staticnotes.org/feed/ rss feed: https://staticnotes.org/feed.xml https://staticnotes.org/feed.xml

throwaway_20357 2y ago

I would say "link blogging" is how weblogs started: Relatively short logs of your accomplishments or mysteries you had solved that day or just musings about one's recent discoveries on the web published on the web. It was an answer to more static "personal websites" where any new article had to justify its existence by meeting a certain threshold of novelty and newsworthiness. Weblogs got shorter and shorter, Tumblr started, then some went on to this new thing called Twitter.

dave333 2y ago

All blogs should have an RSS feed - I wasn't able to find one on Simon Willison's blog. I find the page format hard to read - a mass of text studded with links - it would benefit from more typographic structure - headings and so on.

simonw 2y ago
My feed is linked from the orange feed icon at the top right of the homepage, and also from the Subscribe section linked from each page which takes you to this: https://simonwillison.net/about/#subscribe https://simonwillison.net/about/#subscribe Are you using a screen reader or some other non-standard browser?

mrcsharp 2y ago

This is almost like reaction videos on YouTube but done properly by adding insightful commentary along the way. I can see a trend like this in the blogosphere being beneficial for everyone involved specially the readers.

zoogeny 2y ago

I've recently been wondering if a video is even better than a blog. We're at the point now where I can reasonably keep large numbers of video/text recorded from OBS in S3, run my own speech-to-text, I can cram it all into a SQLite DB, wrap it in a web front-end and then serve it all from cloudfront or wherever. There is obviously benefit in organizing thoughts using essays as a tool, but if you just want a record of your quick thoughts I almost think screen-capture + webcam + spoken word might be a decent option. Literally use OBS to record your 1-hour (or 4 hours) per day HN habit and keep it for prosperity.

bthallplz 2y ago
Somewhat similarly, I've started recording myself talking about various things and then using a speech to text program to transcribe it for me. It just helps me get my thoughts out a bit more fluidly than if I waited for when I can write them down (which then carries with it a temptation to edit as I record). I'll later on clean up the thoughts, though, not just serve them unedited in some way unless it was a really clean take on a topic - trying to be respectful of the audience's time. I do think you're onto something, though, with the idea about using screen recordings as a means of capturing your reactions and thoughts regarding some matter that can be shown visually. I think I'll be doing that soon, but with some editing to the video.
- zoogeny 2y ago
  One thing I was considering in relation to this thought is that many people have written books using stenographers or secretaries. Many other books are edited compilations of lectures or speeches. That is the kind of thing I would normally consider for a CEO or President because the idea of having a secretary whose entire job is to write out your notes is a luxury most can't afford. We are literally at a point in time where we could dictate to a LLM and then get it to turn it into a book for us (if we so desired). It may not be perfect today, but it won't take long at the pace we are improving.

rook1e_dev 2y ago

https://github.com/usememos/memos https://github.com/usememos/memos is perfect for using as a link blog