Simon Willisons’s Approach to Running a Link Blog

Speaking of Simon Willison, I greatly enjoyed this post from last week, with some of the self-imposed principles he follows writing his excellent eponymous blog. Amongst them:

  • I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to, if I can figure that out. Credit is really important, and it’s also useful for myself because I can later search for someone’s name and find other interesting things they have created that I linked to in the past. If I’ve linked to someone’s work three or more times I also try to notice and upgrade them to a dedicated tag. [...]
  • If the original author reads my post, I want them to feel good about it. I know from my own experience that often when you publish something online the silence can be deafening. Knowing that someone else read, appreciated, understood and then shared your work can be very pleasant.
  • A slightly self-involved concern I have is that I like to prove that I’ve read it. This is more for me than for anyone else: I don’t like to recommend something if I’ve not read that thing myself, and sticking in a detail that shows I read past the first paragraph helps keep me honest about that.

Every step of the way, I found myself nodding my head, thinking to myself, I do that too! — right down to creating tags for people after I’ve mentioned their work or simply credited their bylines a few times. (The difference is that Willison seemingly isn’t a procrastinator, and I am, so my decades of tagging aren’t yet exposed to anyone but me.)

Then I got to this:

There are a lot of great link blogs out there, but the one that has influenced me the most in how I approach my own is John Gruber’s Daring Fireball. I really like the way he mixes commentary, quotations and value-added relevant information.

And now it doesn’t seem quite as amazing that I was nodding my head in agreement with each of his guidelines. But, call me biased, it’s still a hell of a good start to a blogging rulebook.

★ Thursday, 2 January 2025