2024-04-15 06:30:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
In case you were wondering why the links on the linkblog have the links repeated, once in the title and once in the domain link. Figured I'd write a quick blog post.
For some examples see todays links here.
Originally I used to have just the domain link. That was for the first 10 years. I would try to create a custom bit of text for each link, but I found that the article title was often better. It started to feel like a bit tedious to always find something original. Then a few years ago, about the time I moved off of Heroku, as part of the redesign I started using the new format, very much inspired by several javascript newsletters I read regularly.
All the newsletters tend to use this format. I find that it's quite effective. There's something that's very appealing about getting a peak at the page on the other side of the link, but also followed up by descriptive text written by the newsletter author. As well as my own personal preferences, I figure they have likely done market research, they are link sharing experts after all.
I already have the domain links operational so figured, I'd keep them. They get added automatically. Occasionally this comes in handy when I want to break from the format for whatever reason.
One of the cool thing with the latest version of my static site generator is that it supports render pipelines, so I can put EJS syntax directly in the link's markdown file. That way I can easily access the file's frontmatter from inside the markdown file body text, and that's where the url is stored, so there isn't any duplication.
That's the reasoning behind the current linkblog link format.