Link blogging is back, baby

Simon Willison offers informal guidelines to link blogging. Let me share with you some of them:

Back in November 2022 I wrote What to blog about, which started with this:

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul!
I always include the names of the people who created the content I am linking to,

Ah I knew I read Simon Willison before. That piece helped me over come a bit of imposter syndrome with blogging. Who is going to read me? I am a nobody! But also I am a nobody :0). What a beautiful freedom.

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.

Coming from the liberal arts, school drilled that copying someone else's words is plagiarism. Attribution is important. Back in my day, backlinks were a way to credit someone.

• I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you’ll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself.

I often don't have much to add when I read something, even if I read the whole thing. I think now it's because I am trying to pass the time or the author did a perfect job in articulating a thing.

• A lot of stuff I link to involves programming. I’ll often include a direct link to relevant code, using the GitHub feature where I can link to a snippet as-of a particular commit. One example is the fetch-rss.py link in this post.

Note to self: he has good examples in writing about programming. Audience is you, not them.

• read several of his pieces on programming and write a piece on programming project

Go do some blogging.