---
id: link-blog
title: Link Blog
summary: Link Thing, a website that published the links I saved to Pinboard for the Weekly Thing, from 2017 to about 2021.
collection: Historical projects
status: retired
url: https://web.archive.org/web/20211207055926/https://links.thingelstad.com/
started: 2017-09-09
topics:
  - open-web
  - archives
sources:
  - kind: website
    url: https://web.archive.org/web/20211207055926/https://links.thingelstad.com/
    role: archive
  - kind: website
    url: https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/18/
    role: reference
  - kind: website
    url: https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/11/08/i-got-my.html
    role: reference
connections:
  - to: weekly-thing
    label: republished the links from
    detail: Link Thing carried the same links that appeared each week in the Weekly Thing, as a website with its own navigation.
    source: https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/18/
page: https://thingelstad.xyz/things/link-blog/
---

# Link Blog

Link Thing, a website that published the links I saved to Pinboard for the Weekly Thing, from 2017 to about 2021.

Link Thing was my link blog at links.thingelstad.com. I already saved the links for the Weekly Thing to Pinboard with Markdown in their descriptions, and I realized the same Markdown could become Jekyll posts. Using the Pinboard API, I wrote each link out as a post and put an early version live, announced in [Weekly Thing 18](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/18/) on September 9, 2017. It carried the same links as the newsletter, “but here it’s a full website with it’s own navigation and such.” Three weeks later I added client-side search with Lunr.js over its 9,000 links ([Weekly Thing 21](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/21/)). In 2017 alone I saved [913 links](https://www.thingelstad.com/2018/01/20/in-links.html). In January 2019 I moved a “good enough” version to Blot ([Weekly Thing 88](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/88/)), and the next month tried Commento comments on it ([Weekly Thing 94](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/94/)).

On November 8, 2020, I [relaunched it](https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/11/08/i-got-my.html) to give the links I shared in the Weekly Thing “a permanent home on the web.” I put Commento back on it as an experiment and added Index pages listing every link saved from a given site. In December 2020 I [switched to Hyvor Talk](https://www.thingelstad.com/2020/12/19/commenting-and-reactions.html) for comments and reactions. The last capture in the [Internet Archive](https://web.archive.org/web/20211207055926/https://links.thingelstad.com/), from December 2021, shows posts through December 2, 2021. The site is gone now.

In [Weekly Thing 274](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/274/) in January 2024, I wrote, “When I was running a link blog… I may create a link blog again in the future, but if I did I want it to not be blog-date-centric but instead content-keyword-search centric.” An earlier experiment with the same idea was links_thing, a [bookmarking wiki](https://www.thingelstad.com/2012/07/01/bookmarking-with-semantic.html) I built on Semantic MediaWiki in 2012 and filled with almost 4,000 links imported from Pinboard.