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Build a link blog like Simon Willison

205 points17 hoursxuanwo.io
simonw16 hours ago

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/

giancarlostoro16 hours 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.

oneeyedpigeon16 hours 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.

fallinditch16 hours 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.

giancarlostoro14 hours 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.

iKlsR13 hours 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.

xuanwo16 hours ago

Wow, thank you for this comment and for continuously sharing!

rcarmo15 hours 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...

ianhawes16 hours ago

Meta would be blogging about this post.

m3kw916 hours ago

I call it recursion

jszymborski17 hours ago

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.

rpastuszak17 hours ago

I had a similar problem with sonnet.io (some articles taking weeks to get done).

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)

jakevoytko16 hours 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.

edoceo17 hours 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

eamag17 hours ago

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?

MattSayar16 hours ago

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.

[0] https://mattsayar.com

purist3316 hours 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.

DJHenk14 hours ago

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/

xuanwo17 hours 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.

simonw15 hours 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!

My link blog entries are often quite long: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark

rcarmo14 hours ago

I've tended to bunch things up in weekly notes myself: https://taoofmac.com/space/notes

robschmidt9013 hours 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.

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

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

xk317 hours ago

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

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

tr3ntg16 hours ago

And this link of yours counts as something "truly novel"?

> 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.

m3kw916 hours ago

This is like assembly code for link blog

zoogeny10 hours ago

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.

be_erik15 hours 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)

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

rook1e_dev5 hours ago

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

sorcercode16 hours ago

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

throwaway_2035713 hours ago

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.

jjude16 hours 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/

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.

smusamashah14 hours ago

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

be_erik14 hours ago

This is such an important task. The web is constantly moving, we have to protect against bitrot.

https://github.com/hoarder-app/hoarder is great for this purpose.

rednafi16 hours 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].

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

tomrod17 hours ago

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.

dave33312 hours ago

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.

simonw11 hours ago

My feed is linked from the orange feed icon at the top right of the homepage, and also from the Subscribe section linked from each page which takes you to this: https://simonwillison.net/about/#subscribe

Are you using a screen reader or some other non-standard browser?

mrcsharp11 hours ago

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.

yawnxyz15 hours 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

samim15 hours 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.

sodimel16 hours 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/

seafoamteal14 hours ago

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

pknerd15 hours ago

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

peiskos14 hours ago

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

brianzelip16 hours ago

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

blackeyeblitzar16 hours ago

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

simonw13 hours 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.

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.

rcarmo14 hours ago

He's been supplying us with very regular updates on LLM-related topics, which is very much in vogue these days.

m3kw916 hours ago

Let the era of the link blog begin