A couple of my more recent posts have been “link blogs”, but what am I doing when I do that and why put the effort in at all?
What is a link blog?
A link blog post is a short blog post for something that I’ve read, which interests me. I’ll publish a link, some commentary, and any excerpts that interest me. The goal is for them to be brief.
This idea is loosely taken from Simon Willison’s Weblog:
I proposed two categories of content that are low stakes and high value: things I learned and descriptions of my projects.
I realize now that link blogging deserves to be included a third category of low stakes, high value writing. We could think of that category as things I’ve found.
That’s the purpose of my link blog: it’s an ongoing log of things I’ve found—effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.
I really enjoy reading Simon Willison’s link blog posts—they’re short and insightful. They broaden my perspective on working in and with technology. So I figured I’d share a little bit about why I’m adopting that practice on my own blog.
Why link blog?
The plan for this blog was to have it be a mixture of personal and professional content. As a technical writer, I’m a technologist. A user and creator of technology. So mostly, my blog posts will be about technology as it intersects with my life, my personal projects, etc.
There are three main reasons:
- Simplicity
- Building a record
- Contributing to a better Internet
Simplicity
This is about simplifying my blogging practice some.
Like many writers, I find it easy to over write. If I get into a good flow state, all of a sudden there’s thousands of words in front of me, and not all of them are good. I have a folder in the GitHub repo for this site containing various drafts and ideas that I’ve been working on. Some may end up published, a lot won’t. Feeling comfortable putting a 3000 word post out there without an editor is something that takes time and effort. Anything that I put on the web is a reflection of who I am, to some extent, and this website is part of my professional presence.
While I want to write long form pieces, the significance and effort can be limiting, and it’s easy to fall out of a practice.
By identifying an alternate form of blogging, I can blog more regularly, and keep engaged with this website as a project. I have a rough limit of a couple of paragraphs of my thoughts about what I’ve been reading. The goal is to identify something of interest, then add something like a thought, a connection to something that I read, record my thoughts and move on. The simplicity of the format frees me from a lot of anxiety about having to polish something a bit longer.
Building a record
Like many writers, I really enjoy the act of reading. Books yes, but I still like reading articles, blog posts, interesting read-mes or conceptual pieces, wiki articles, and more. The variety and amount of written content is part of what makes the Internet a good and valuable thing.
Having a record of what I’ve read, and what thoughts those things have prompted in me is valuable for my own curiosity and learning. Sure I can bookmark things in my browser, but if you’re like me, your bookmarks are a messy morass. My RSS reader, Inoreader, is great and I routinely save things to come back to later, but also allows for stronger navigation of resources.
But with a link blog, I can add my own thoughts and connections. The blog becomes a record of what I was thinking about as I read those things. And that’s valuable for me when I come back to them later. If you’re reading and following this, you might be interested in the same kinds of things that I’m interested in and I hope that once or twice a week, some of my thoughts about the Internet, culture, or technology will be valuable for you as well.
Building a better Internet
The Internet is at it is best when its filled with multiple voices and perspectives. Amplifying other voices, platforms, tools, perspectives is an easy way to contribute to this version of the Internet. In many ways, the Internet of 2025 feels oppressive. But as Molly White notes in her talk at XOXO in 2024:
That’s because what really sucks about the web these days, what has us feeling despair and anger, has everything to do with the industry that has formed around the web, but not the web itself. The web is still just a substrate on which anything can be built. Most importantly, the web is the people who use it, not the companies that have established themselves around it.
And the widespread disillusionment that we’re seeing may actually be a good thing. More people than ever have realized that the utopian dreams of a web that could only bring about positive and wonderful things might have been misguided. That tech companies maybe don’t always have our best interests in mind. And that slogans like “don’t be evil” might be more about marketing than about truth.
With this knowledge comes power. The power to shape the web that we want to see, while fighting against the one that we don’t. The tech industry has structural and financial power of its own, to be sure, but the only thing that enables the kind of rot—and to quote Cory Doctorow, “enshitification”—that we’ve seen spread throughout the platforms that now form a large part of people’s online experiences, is the platforms’ stranglehold on the web. And that is tenuous.
I want a wild Internet, where people can easily create what they want, with minimal constraints from platform providers.
A personal blog is part of that project. It’s a way to contribute to more perspectives and share other voices that are writing and contributing to the same project. I hope that authors who find their way here get something out of my thoughts about their writing, or that people who end up following my blog find something of value from the content on my site.
The main point is that this record is something I own, I can make freely available, and can be accessed independent of algorithms that are meant to shape people’s attention. You can add this site to your RSS reader. Or you might stumble across a link to my thoughts in a social media algorithm.
The independence and accessibility of it is something that’s worthwhile, rather than keeping my thoughts locked up inside of LinkedIn or another closed ecosystem.
How to build a link blog
There are a number of ways to do this:
- I build this website with Hugo, a simple static site generator. This means my content is mostly Markdown files on my laptop, which are turned to HTML, and I can move from host to host. The only costs are hosting (negligible to free) and the domain name/DNS. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but on the whole a curious, intelligent person can create their own site easily.
- If you are a developer you may want to pivot to a SSG that uses a language you are familiar with. Jekyll, Astro, Pelican, are all strong alternatives and there’s many more out there.
- If you want a less hands-on experience, I strongly recommend Ghost. Ghost is a service for publishing newsletters and blogs. Like Substack, without some of the complicated politics.
- WordPress is a bit more of a traditional blogging engine, though I feel like the ecosystem can be overwhelming at first, you might be interested in this if you are a more visual person.
What I like about Hugo is my ability to control and tweak many aspects of this site, while keeping the costs low. Aside from the domain name, with the amount of traffic I receive, the cost of my personal website is pretty much negligible.
If you’re interested in doing something similar, the broad steps are to:
- Experiment with building a Hugo site on your computer, choose a theme that supports blogging, and get a working mockup together.
- Purchase a domain name — this article from Cloudflare goes into this topic in detail.
- Configure a hosting service and transfer your site to that hosting service. Here’s Hugo’s walkthrough on how to do this with Github Pages.
- Map the DNS records for your domain name to your hosting service (Here’s a tutorial from Github Pages).
Details will vary based on your service providers, so please take these steps as a rough guide. Ultimately, once you’ve got the hang of deploying your site, it’s a good feeling, and you’ll be able to build your own little pocket of thoughts on the internet, making it a better place for everyone.