Three runs at my links

I have been saving links since August 2005, and three times I have built a place of my own to keep them.

The first was links_thing, in 2012. After months of thinking about hosting my own bookmarks I built a wiki on Semantic MediaWiki where every bookmark was a page. A bookmarklet filled in the title and excerpt, a form made entry easy, and I imported just under 4,000 links from Pinboard. Owning the data was the whole point. “It is mine,” I wrote. I added views no bookmarking service offered, like bookmarks on a calendar, and a 35-line Python bot that checked five random bookmarks an hour and stripped tracking codes. By 2014 the wiki had gone quiet, and I was saving to Pinboard again when the Weekly Thing started in 2017.

The second was Link Thing, a link blog. The links I saved for the Weekly Thing already had Markdown in their Pinboard descriptions, and the same Markdown could become Jekyll posts. I put it live in September 2017, added search over 9,000 links three weeks later, moved it to Blot in 2019, and relaunched it in November 2020 to give the links “a permanent home on the web.” The last copy in the Internet Archive is from December 2021. The site is gone now.

In January 2024 I wrote in Weekly Thing 274 that if I ever made a link blog again, I wanted it “to not be blog-date-centric but instead content-keyword-search centric.” That is the sentence Linking Things started from. I built it on October 23, 2026, with coding agents: every link I have saved since 2005, 16,524 of them from 7,064 hosts, one page per link, search first, and the Weekly Thing issue that carried each one. Every link has a JSON and a Markdown twin, every host has feeds of its own, and there is no server behind any of it.

Each run kept something from the one before. The wiki was about owning the data. The blog showed me that dates are the wrong spine for links. Linking Things is built on both. And the reason for all of it is the hyperlink. As I put it in Weekly Thing 352, “Long live the hyperlink!”