I love how this post is an exact implementation of my advice on link blogging (add some personal commentary, quote liberally) - applied to my article about link blogging. Very meta. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/
iKlsR [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Random, been reading your blog and following posts for years esp since llm boom and I'm just noticing it's Willison not Williamson lol.
giancarlostoro [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This... might be what I need to do honestly. I've thought about a good way to save some links I find on HN, and its painful to go back through pages. Heck, sometimes I lose my own comments. A blog might just be the way to regain access to lost content from HN.
oneeyedpigeon [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Sounds like you might want a good bookmarking service. Pinboard used to be great. I still use it, but I'm not sure what it's like for new signups. I'm also in the process of migrating that data to localhost with some added scripts because it feels like I should own that data and... yeah, the aforementioned upheaval.
fallinditch [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I use Tumblr to save interesting links. It gives me a nice chronological record of stuff I'm interested in. It acts as a memory aid too - when I need to find something but can't remember the name but I know I blogged it a few weeks ago.
giancarlostoro [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I used to use Tumblr, but for memes. Any time I try to make a new account, nostalgia kicks in, and I just don't want to use it, I had friendships I'll never get back on there.
rcarmo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Which is great advice. I personally struggle (a lot) with the time required to maintain a link blog with such granularity, which is why https://taoofmac.com does have a link namespace, but I typically only post about a link if I have one or two paragraphs to say about it _and_ the time to focus to whittle it down to something readable.
And I fully agree with the notion of "backing up" or keeping track of what was there (that's why I typically include a screenshot in my links).
But the key thing for me is that the time spent in the context shift "in and out" of writing starts taking a toll--especially since I tend to only post about links over breakfast, since I seldom have time to write "properly" by the end of my day, and prefer to devote my breaks to moving and doing house chores for "exercise" and getting tech out of my mind.
So a link blog of such density seems like a tricky juggling act...
xuanwo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Wow, thank you for this comment and for continuously sharing!
I tend to suffer from scope creep in my blogs. "Oh, I found a quicker way to compute X, lets write a blog about it" becomes "I should write a library, write docs, run extensive comparatives, then publish it".
I've been getting better at fighting that temptation, but I still suck at it. Setting deadlines for blog posts usually helps me focus my efforts.
rpastuszak [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I had a similar problem with sonnet.io (some articles taking weeks to get done).
Consistency really helps - there are posts that I had spent weeks on and barely anyone read them in the first place. Then, once I started posting smaller, messier notes almost daily, both the traffic (not that important to me) and the amount of interesting interactions with people (very important to me) went up by 100x.
Another way in which I avoided yak shaving/scope creep was to ditch my own site and rely on Obsidian Publish (I went back to my own solution after a year, as a reward for mostly sticking to the plan)
jakevoytko [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I used to have the problem where all of my posts would be 2000-3000 words, or more likely I would never finish them. So I started a newsletter in November. I committed to publishing every Monday and Thursday. Furthermore, since I have a wife and a toddler, I basically have about 4-5 hours to work on every post. The regular schedule has helped me get over my perfectionism, aggressively cut scope, and ship on time.
edoceo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
For these things, I use the Pomodoro method. I wanna do the thing, it's not critical, let's grind it for 30 minutes, set a timer, then (the hard part) stop
robschmidt90 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
It seems like simon started a trend :)
I implemented this feature on my blog a couple of weeks ago. I view it as the equivalent of a retweet, only that I own the content. If someone wants to subscribe, they can follow the respective rss feed. Maybe in the future I automatically push the updates to mastodon/bluesky/etc.
I've settled on posting interesting links to BlueSky and then I put a Bsky sidebar on my site[0]. It's a win-win; I have the small links+comments "on" my site, but the longer stuff that gets posted to RSS/newsletter to my site proper.
I think bundling links is better than just throwing one out whenever you find it. If you get one link at a random time, you probably skip it. Unless you are a dopamine addict, in which case I just broke your concentration and fueled a bad habit.
A weekly, or monthly collection is something a reader can take their time for. Or put aside for a moment and come back later to it.
A downside of link bundles is that on an average blog, each installment becomes a page, and one has to click a lot before one gets to the interesting part.
My linkblog therefore sends a collection of links every week via RSS (and others like Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. will follow, if I ever take the time to implement it), but on the web it is just one long list, ready for consumption: https://ewintr.nl/linklog/
purist33 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Like the other reply said, a monthly link blog would be too much. I find myself ignoring a lot of those links of the month posts because it covers too many topics and I end up not liking most of it. Whereas one which has small commentary on a single link is great for me, since if i like the commentary enough, I would add the link to my read later.
xuanwo [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Some quick ideas:
- Multiple links in the same post make it difficult to organize discussions and thoughts.
- Monthly posts require extra effort to maintain and update, which didn't align with our initial goal of sharing more casually and recording our thoughts in real time.
- Modern static site generators support maintaining archive pages by month, so we no longer need to do it manually.
Hoping those ideas make sense to you.
simonw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Depends on how much commentary you are adding. If more than a sentence it's worth having a separate page so that other people can link to what you said!
I would say "link blogging" is how weblogs started: Relatively short logs of your accomplishments or mysteries you had solved that day or just musings about one's recent discoveries on the web published on the web. It was an answer to more static "personal websites" where any new article had to justify its existence by meeting a certain threshold of novelty and newsworthiness. Weblogs got shorter and shorter, Tumblr started, then some went on to this new thing called Twitter.
xk3 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If I feel like I truly learned something novel I'll add a link here:
I'm joking, this is really funny, and many of your links are very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing.
m3kw9 [3 hidden]5 mins ago
This is like assembly code for link blog
be_erik [3 hidden]5 mins ago
My link blog is just an rss feed. It's immensely helpful. I can feed the articles into LLMs so they can be tagged and summarized and I always have a copy (no bitrot thanks to monolith: https://github.com/Y2Z/monolith)
Love this approach. For the Hugo blog users, my theme https://github.com/kaushikgopal/henry-hugo makes this style of blogging easy. Just add external link in the yaml header and it'll be marked up as a "link" style post
jjude [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I created a new category "/cpn/" (stands for commonlog) and posting links with my understanding. You can see them here: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/
As he says, having a link blog is a "low stakes, high value" activity. More people should carry it out.
yawnxyz [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I built a link blog system for myself that made it very very easy to just write new Notion pages and they'll just be on the site... except there's some kind of quicksand that prevents me from doing that on a regular basis. I really need to get that out of my head
samim [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I use my homebrew CMS for this called flow https://github.com/samim23/flow A lightweight static site generator with built-in CMS that creates linkblog-style content feeds.
rednafi [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Cool stuff. I also did something similar recently. Didn’t want to maintain a dynamic site just for this, so I took the least tech-savvy option.
Added a new section to my blog that lists one page per year. Each page lists all my entries in reverse chronological order. Wrote about it here[1].
I've been considering doing this as well, if only for me to engage better with the things I read.
sodimel [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Thanks for this interesting article!
I added it to my sharing link service (kinda like a link blog, I think): https://links.l3m.in/en/
pknerd [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Never understood how he get time to do so many things. He is very productive
peiskos [3 hidden]5 mins ago
If anyone has other interesting link blogs, do share them here
brianzelip [3 hidden]5 mins ago
Great idea! Viewing source is a big reason I visit.
blackeyeblitzar [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I’ve seen Simon’s blog suddenly posted on the front page nearly daily. Did something change recently that it became more popular?
simonw [3 hidden]5 mins ago
I think it's just a fluke. You'll notice that I didn't submit any of the recent links myself - I don't tend to submit stuff from my link blog, I only submit my longer-form writing.
And I fully agree with the notion of "backing up" or keeping track of what was there (that's why I typically include a screenshot in my links).
But the key thing for me is that the time spent in the context shift "in and out" of writing starts taking a toll--especially since I tend to only post about links over breakfast, since I seldom have time to write "properly" by the end of my day, and prefer to devote my breaks to moving and doing house chores for "exercise" and getting tech out of my mind.
So a link blog of such density seems like a tricky juggling act...
I've been getting better at fighting that temptation, but I still suck at it. Setting deadlines for blog posts usually helps me focus my efforts.
So, I started untested (https://untested.sonnet.io) where for 111 days no matter what I'd share a post per day. Here's the first post: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/111
Consistency really helps - there are posts that I had spent weeks on and barely anyone read them in the first place. Then, once I started posting smaller, messier notes almost daily, both the traffic (not that important to me) and the amount of interesting interactions with people (very important to me) went up by 100x.
Another way in which I avoided yak shaving/scope creep was to ditch my own site and rely on Obsidian Publish (I went back to my own solution after a year, as a reward for mostly sticking to the plan)
I implemented this feature on my blog a couple of weeks ago. I view it as the equivalent of a retweet, only that I own the content. If someone wants to subscribe, they can follow the respective rss feed. Maybe in the future I automatically push the updates to mastodon/bluesky/etc.
feed section: https://staticnotes.org/feed/
rss feed: https://staticnotes.org/feed.xml
I personally prefer this format (https://eamag.me/2025/Links-For-January-2025) and you can post single links on social media instead no?
[0] https://mattsayar.com
A weekly, or monthly collection is something a reader can take their time for. Or put aside for a moment and come back later to it.
A downside of link bundles is that on an average blog, each installment becomes a page, and one has to click a lot before one gets to the interesting part.
My linkblog therefore sends a collection of links every week via RSS (and others like Bluesky, Mastodon, etc. will follow, if I ever take the time to implement it), but on the web it is just one long list, ready for consumption: https://ewintr.nl/linklog/
- Multiple links in the same post make it difficult to organize discussions and thoughts.
- Monthly posts require extra effort to maintain and update, which didn't align with our initial goal of sharing more casually and recording our thoughts in real time.
- Modern static site generators support maintaining archive pages by month, so we no longer need to do it manually.
Hoping those ideas make sense to you.
My link blog entries are often quite long: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark
https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/kno...
> https://youtu.be/Of9yvKINITg # 10 hours of silence occasionally broken up by the Taco bell Bong
I'm joking, this is really funny, and many of your links are very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing.
https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml
In fact, I also posted about Simon's post: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/informal-guidelines-for-running-a-...
As he says, having a link blog is a "low stakes, high value" activity. More people should carry it out.
Added a new section to my blog that lists one page per year. Each page lists all my entries in reverse chronological order. Wrote about it here[1].
[1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/
To the sharing of interesting things and thoughts.
https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder is great for this purpose.
I added it to my sharing link service (kinda like a link blog, I think): https://links.l3m.in/en/
Here's everything from my domain: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net
A few of my recent self-submissions went nowhere, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42810520 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42461073 for example.