I'm not very convinced by the results of this "Auto Linker". I find most of the links in that article are rather useless, linking only to have a link to something.<p>IMHO links should be chosen "wisely", with the intent of helping the reader to find more information on important parts of the article or referencing other work etc.<p>Linking to the definition of rabbit holes is not really useful, if I'm not talking about varying sizes and depths of rabbit holes due to different breeds of rabbits and their prefered style of rabbit hole digging.
I agree about the importance of links. In fact, when I come across an article about something that many others have written about, and it has no links or references, I often just don’t read it.<p>But the links in this article, the ones generated by a script, are worse than useless. Meaning, they’re a waste of time that makes the text worse.<p>First of all, they are set to open a new tab. Rude. Second of all, a link to a wikipedia page for a term, for example, is just stupid noise. If I want to know what wikipedia has plagiarized about a certain topic I can go there and look it up.<p>Links are not an afterthought, something that can be usefully tacked on to the finished text. Each link should be genuinely helpful, or back up an assertion. Ideally, each one should be non-obvious.
I think it's a cool idea. What would be even cooler would be if it would do a content based search of your browser history, and suggest the most relevant pages for the thing you want to link. So, ideally it would be finding the pages you actually looked at. (Although, in practice it becomes difficult when you use all kinds of different devices to browse with, plus whether there's enough information to search with to retrieve the page. But I imagine something could be thrown together that does work a decent percentage of the time.)
Here's a snippet I use for this kind of thing:<p><pre><code> (defun my/org-insert-wikipedia-link ()
(interactive)
(apply-to-region (lambda (string)
"Convert a string to a link to English Wikipedia"
(concat "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/" (subst-char-in-string ? ?_ string) "][" string "]]"))))
</code></pre>
I imagine you could do something similar for the other examples in the post. Makes adding these links pretty painless.
Wow. I thought this was going to be a big rant piece on why we should all go back to dynamic linking again and I was so ready to start my Monday off with a spicy take.<p>But yes we should all also be adding links in our writing and publishing on our own platforms.
>I have so many linkless posts waiting to be published: I could go ahead and publish them as-is, but by doing so I feel as though I’d be treating you, dear reader, unjustly.<p>How about allowing the readers to participate? Posts could be in a pre-publish state and the community could add link suggestions and annotations.
I am a blogger, and I'll stay a blogger even with GPT stuff.<p>I agree. As bloggers continue to link only to good stuff between them, those blogs will become infinitely more valuable than the flood of trash that people will post from GPT.<p>It seems hopeless that people will find that good stuff, but word of mouth will do it, I think.
Do most people write stuff and then go back and search for links to relevant content?<p>As a writer, I'm continually inspired by things I read or watch, and when I find something, I add it to my references. I use Zotero[1], but it's not the only solution. When I start writing, I already have my notes and the links to sources and related content. I don't add in links as an afterthought, the writing is informed by the related material.<p>Maybe, once in while, when I've done a couple of drafts and am getting close to the final version, I'll go back and add in links, but rarely do I spend time poking around on the web. I go to my references. Granted, the reference database takes effort to create and maintain, but the end result is far better than what I'd get just doing a web search for a term.<p>1 <a href="https://www.zotero.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.zotero.org/</a>
I 100% agree with this, and I try to stick by it for just about every article I write now. Does someone I'm interviewing talk about a game or movie they enjoyed as a kid? It'll get linked to the Wikipedia page for said work, or if possible a place the user can (legally) buy or experience it for themselves. Reference something I made in the past? That'll get linked where relevant, and the same goes for anything mentioned by a source too. And I'll always link to the original source if possible too, not the random reprint/paraphrased version from whatever popular news site or service covered it this time.<p>Love the idea of using a script to help with this too, though it's usually the harder to find stuff that's more valuable to link to, not things you ca immediately find with a quick Google search (like the Google home page).
I want to implement this in my Hugo blog build process. Initially, I thought it was ironic that there was not a single link to Linkoln, until I realized that code is on the article and there's no code in github.<p><pre><code> > The script itself is… pretty dumb.
</code></pre>
Actually, simple code is the best code.
> It may be my lack of discipline<p>This is where the article lost me. If it feels like a lack of discipline, it probably is.<p>By placing links in an article, the author asserts that those were intentional choices just as much as were any of the other writing decisions made while making the post. The same thing goes for decisions surrounding the theme of the blog and what DNS name the blog is found under. The author is presenting an idea; more or less effort can be put into this, but it will show if effort isn't put into it.<p>Not spending time on links is the equivalent of not spending time on citations, arguably one of the most important parts of an academic paper. It is almost as important a part of the writing as the writing itself.
I love the concept of getting links "out of the way," though I did it slightly differently. Instead of having links in the body of the text, links in the text of my docs tend to be links to citations in a reference section on the same page.<p><a href="https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_so_plain.html" rel="nofollow">https://meadhbh.hamrick.rocks/v2/design/why_is_my_web_site_s...</a>
I find it quite odd and funny that the author specifically mentions Google, and his script has a function `def google_it(query):` but then in the function he uses DuckDuckGo. Is the author ashamed, or does he expect people to not trust DDG?
As a political blogger and upcoming author, links to sources are damn important for me, for a multitude of reasons:<p>- they allow me to back up claims with cold, hard facts instead of "pure hearsay"<p>- they defend me from getting held liable... say someone files a libel suit/C&D order against me. If I have a link to a proper, accepted medium (e.g. a newspaper or a TV station), I can defend my claim by pointing to the original source(s).<p>However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to link to stuff:<p>- publishers decide to put interesting content behind paywalls, leading to a constant noise of "can't read, paywall"<p>- publishers decide to re-launch their website, but not set proper redirects so all my archives are dead now<p>- German public TV/radio has to take web articles and TV/radio archives offline after a few days or months, because private media got a court decision and then a legal provision forcing them to take down content [1]<p>- some media absolutely LOVE live tickers, but you can't directly link to posts in these for posteriority<p>[1] <a href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren" rel="nofollow">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depublizieren</a>
Here's a better approach - never, ever include a link unless it is important and cogent to the topic. Humorous or casual linking is just noise, and it can shroud actually useful links. We all can find information, so it isn't valuable linking to the definition of phrases or words, etc.<p>If you're referencing a study, link to the study. If you're citing a tweet, link to the tweet. Otherwise save spurious links as they add zero value and are a distraction and an unnecessary decoration making text less readable.<p>As an aside, I chuckled seeing the link to Atwood's "be a bigshot blogger" post where he recommended that people blog constantly about everything. For those who haven't kept track, that was a failure model. It made people basically give up on "blogs" because there was so much low value content, with people writing on a schedule rather than because they had actually interesting content. Now everyone just hopes that the rare useful post appears on a social news or media site.
Just a word of writing advice, if you link content inside the text it should be first or last word, never in the middle. It just takes a lot of effort to know what the link in the middle of the text is about.