LB Link Blog

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 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). In 2017 alone I saved 913 links. In January 2019 I moved a “good enough” version to Blot (Weekly Thing 88), and the next month tried Commento comments on it (Weekly Thing 94).

On November 8, 2020, I relaunched it 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 for comments and reactions. The last capture in the Internet Archive, from December 2021, shows posts through December 2, 2021. The site is gone now.

In Weekly Thing 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 I built on Semantic MediaWiki in 2012 and filled with almost 4,000 links imported from Pinboard.