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/

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.

Why not combine links in one monthly post similar to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-january-2025

I personally prefer this format (https://eamag.me/2025/Links-For-January-2025) and you can post single links on social media instead no?

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.

feed section: https://staticnotes.org/feed/

rss feed: https://staticnotes.org/feed.xml

If I feel like I truly learned something novel I'll add a link here:

https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/journal/blob/main/lists/kno...

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/

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.

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.

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)

https://enlace.space/~erik/rss.xml

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

All blogs should have an RSS feed - I wasn't able to find one on Simon Willison's blog. I find the page format hard to read - a mass of text studded with links - it would benefit from more typographic structure - headings and so on.

I've recently been wondering if a video is even better than a blog.

We're at the point now where I can reasonably keep large numbers of video/text recorded from OBS in S3, run my own speech-to-text, I can cram it all into a SQLite DB, wrap it in a web front-end and then serve it all from cloudfront or wherever.

There is obviously benefit in organizing thoughts using essays as a tool, but if you just want a record of your quick thoughts I almost think screen-capture + webcam + spoken word might be a decent option. Literally use OBS to record your 1-hour (or 4 hours) per day HN habit and keep it for prosperity.

https://github.com/usememos/memos is perfect for using as a link blog

I'm inspired. My tiny link blog, Roderick.dev, has languished for a long time as I've thought through the right voice.

To the sharing of interesting things and thoughts.

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].

[1]: https://rednafi.com/misc/link_blog/

Suggestion: Add waybackmachine/archive URL for each of the link that you blog about. Archive it if it's not there already.

I’ve seen Simon’s blog suddenly posted on the front page nearly daily. Did something change recently that it became more popular?

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

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.

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/

This is almost like reaction videos on YouTube but done properly by adding insightful commentary along the way.

I can see a trend like this in the blogosphere being beneficial for everyone involved specially the readers.

Never understood how he get time to do so many things. He is very productive

I've been considering doing this as well, if only for me to engage better with the things I read.

If anyone has other interesting link blogs, do share them here

Great idea! Viewing source is a big reason I visit.

Let the era of the link blog begin