This content originally appeared on My journal — Ethan Marcotte’s website and was authored by Ethan Marcotte
World’s on fire and the ghouls keep buying matches, so I’m working on my website.
At the end of last week, I launched a very basic “links and sundries” page. Pretty much ever since I joined Twitter (valē), social media has always been where I’ve shared links I find interesting or inspiring. I’ve always wanted a more permanent solution — or more permanent-feeling, anyway; what’s a link’s average lifespan these days? — so I built one for my website.
When I say “very basic,” I mean very basic. When I first launched it last Thursday night, each link was generated from a Markdown file I’d created in a folder. Heck, the page didn’t even have an RSS feed when it first went live. (It has one now, if that’s your thing.) I’ve spent the intervening days trying to spruce the place up.
As of today, everything in the links section is pulled in from a bookmarking service called Raindrop.io. That’s due entirely to Sophie Koonin, who wrote an excellent post showing how she uses Raindrop.io and Eleventy to automatically generate her weekly link posts. Without Sophie’s stellar tutorial, I would’ve been stuck cobbling together Markdown files by hand, like some sort of feral woodland creature.1 But now, every time I build my site it fetches any new bookmarks I’ve made that day, and creates a post for each bookmark it finds.
I’m really happy with this setup. I can trawl the internet as I am wont to do, saving links to my heart’s content. There’s still more I could do, though. I should probably set up permalinks for each post. Also, while I’m tagging the links I save, I’m not currently showing those tags on the page — that’s probably worth fixing. And I’ve been thinking about other kinds of things I might want to save in that section: not just links to interesting articles or websites, but maybe the odd video or photo I find inspiring. Just to fully embrace l’esprit du Tumblr, I guess.
I’ve also thought about what I won’t be doing with that new links section. Namely, I don’t see myself automatically sharing bookmarked sites on social media. That’s not to suggest in any way that this is a bad pattern! If you do something similar on your site, I think that’s grand — truly. But when I launched the first version last week, I reflected a bit on how I’ve spent years running to social media to share links with my followers. And I realized that this new section felt different: it felt like something I’d made for me. I think I’d like to keep it that way, at least for now. Because in a small way, it feels like coming home.
Footnote
You know. Like a marmot that, uh, hoards text files. Just like that. (I’m so tired.) ↩︎
This has been “Link bug.” a post from Ethan’s journal.
This content originally appeared on My journal — Ethan Marcotte’s website and was authored by Ethan Marcotte
Ethan Marcotte | Sciencx (2025-06-23T04:00:00+00:00) Link bug.. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/06/23/link-bug/
Please log in to upload a file.
There are no updates yet.
Click the Upload button above to add an update.