My approach to running a link blog ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ !https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#atom-everything Date: December 23, 2024 Image: My approach to running a link blog — I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” … My approach to running a link blog I started running a basic link blog on this domain back in November 2003—publishing links (which I called “blogmarks”) with a title, URL, short snippet of commentary and a “via” … Simon Willison’s Weblog · simonwillison.net I still cannot believe I thought I had such a unique idea with thoughts only to find out shortly thereafter that Simon beat me to the punch by about 20 years! Simon put a lot of work into this post <https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#thoughts.waylonwalker.com> please check it out. Its not only filled with tons of little nuggets about blogging, it has just a ton of links to other posts I’m itching to read now. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/22/link-blog/#thoughts.waylonwalker.com a linkblog proves that you read ─────────────────────────────── Simon mentions it in the post as well, but one thing about having a link blog does is that it proves that you actually read articles that you share. This is really more about proving to myself, and reminding myself that anyone else, it’s a good feeling. Trying to add soemthing extra ───────────────────────────── - include names of people, and add tags for common people - something extra - the whole point is to bring something to the post without stealing thunder, but rather linkbuilding for the author that put the hard work in. - copious amounts of quotes - It should bring the author up not put them down A post a day ──────────── well .98 posts per day Simon mentions starting in Nov 2003, which puts that at 7722 days since then. That is so close to a post a day for 21 years, even though they are often as short as one sentence that is impressive to keep up over time. │ So far I’ve published 7,607 link blog posts and counting. What’s my rate ────────────── I just check and I am at 513 days in with 413 posts (0.8 posts/day). Not quite up to Simon, but close enough to be proud of. My only grief is that I didn’t start sooner. My stack ──────── I have a full post explaining more about how I do mine and the stack behind it here. https://waylonwalker.com/thoughts/ See Images are hard! ──────────────────── This is one of the main reasons that I built dropper <https://dropper.waylonwalker.com> for myself, and plan to include it in fokais <https://fokais.com> as a product to help others with their blog. This is definite evidence that I am not the only one with this issue! I’ve made images easy form myself ───────────────────────────────── I’ve tried half a dozen or so easy techniques from obsidian to various github repos and none have really hit me with inspiration to really add screenshots like I do with dropper <https://dropper.waylonwalker.com>. I write all of my thoughts posts in a chrome extension drop down local first style and when i hit paste it uploads and gives me a markdown image link, it cannot be easier for me. When I store them I compress them and convert them to webp. I serve them by streaming them out of an s3 bucket with fastapi </fastapi/> and some very generous cloudflare cache headers, so I should only get a request for that image about once a year. │ Warning, I built dropper for me, no guarantees that it works forever, foakis will be for more users. Image: image Bluesky does not penalize for links ─────────────────────────────────── I am loving bluesky more and more, learning this just gave it another level up. -------- Series ────── I just noticed that Simon has Series on his blog in a very elegant way. One I need to get back to blogging more, I did not do so good in 2024, and two this is awesome and I want it. Image: image  <https://dropper.waylonwalker.com/api/file/ec59349e-cca7-4fa9-a57e-50cc442305db.webp>test