💭 My Approach To Running A Link Blog

Here's my thought on 💭 My approach to running a link blog

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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 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 for myself, and plan to include it in fokais 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. 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 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.

Bluesky does not penalize for links

I am loving bluesky more and more, learning this just gave it another level up.

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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.

test

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This post was a thought by Waylon Walker see all my thoughts at https://waylonwalker.com/thoughts