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/
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.
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.
I use Tumblr to save interesting links. It gives me a nice chronological record of stuff I'm interested in. It acts as a memory aid too - when I need to find something but can't remember the name but I know I blogged it a few weeks ago.
I used to use Tumblr, but for memes. Any time I try to make a new account, nostalgia kicks in, and I just don't want to use it, I had friendships I'll never get back on there.
Which is great advice. I personally struggle (a lot) with the time required to maintain a link blog with such granularity, which is why https://taoofmac.com does have a link namespace, but I typically only post about a link if I have one or two paragraphs to say about it _and_ the time to focus to whittle it down to something readable.
And I fully agree with the notion of "backing up" or keeping track of what was there (that's why I typically include a screenshot in my links).
But the key thing for me is that the time spent in the context shift "in and out" of writing starts taking a toll--especially since I tend to only post about links over breakfast, since I seldom have time to write "properly" by the end of my day, and prefer to devote my breaks to moving and doing house chores for "exercise" and getting tech out of my mind.
So a link blog of such density seems like a tricky juggling act...
Twitter was micro-blogging and this style is a reflection on a reflection. Meta-blogging is perhaps exactly what this style is.
Like reaction videos, this is a great way to repackage original material for a wider audience. The cynic in me bristles at the "value capture" here but the optimistic view is that this approach could genuinely breath new life into the "blogosphere".
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
I think bundling links is better than just throwing one out whenever you find it. If you get one link at a random time, you probably skip it. Unless you are a dopamine addict, in which case I just broke your concentration and fueled a bad habit.
A weekly, or monthly collection is something a reader can take their time for. Or put aside for a moment and come back later to it.
A downside of link bundles is that on an average blog, each installment becomes a page, and one has to click a lot before one gets to the interesting part.
My linkblog therefore sends a collection of links every week via RSS (and others like Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. will follow, if I ever take the time to implement it), but on the web it is just one long list, ready for consumption: https://ewintr.nl/linklog/
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!
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.
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.
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)
Love this approach. For the Hugo blog users, my theme 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
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.
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
Are you using a screen reader or some other non-standard browser?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I use my homebrew CMS for this called flow https://github.com/samim23/flow A lightweight static site generator with built-in CMS that creates linkblog-style content feeds.
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