Small Web September Check-In 1: Links!
Sep. 7th, 2025 08:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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smallwebWe’ve reached the first check-in point for Small Web September! How is everyone doing so far? Whether you’re just getting warmed up or are already ticking off goals (or maybe you just found this and want to join – welcome!), come and share your progress in the comments of this check-in.
The theme of this week’s check-in is links! Earlier this year, I came across Coy (osteophage)’s link compilation in praise of links, which led me down a rabbit hole of reading various essays about the importance of hyperlinking and being a good steward of the web. This includes not making your own site into an effective dead end, but sending people on to interesting destinations via links that you’ve included there.
I’ve always been a lover of curating cool webpages and sites, but it struck me that I wasn’t actually doing much of this on my own little website – now, it’s a personal fanworks archive, so you could argue that linking out to random pages is a bit out of step with the purpose of it. However, it broadened my thinking about where I could start adding more links: from archiving rec lists to linking out to gifts that other fans had made for me over the years.
So, the discussion starter for this check-in is: how do you link, and to what? Do you have a link hub or set of interesting finds? Would you like to do more with links?
As a bonus: share some of your favourite interesting links (this can be anything from thought-provoking essays to just cool stuff! They don't need to be explicitly small-web-themed, although that's great too).
And of course, let us know how your Small Web September project(s) is/are going!
As a reminder, this is the first of four ‘check-in’/comment points that will be published during the event – you can check out the schedule and dates of these posts over on the event intro. There’s no cut-off point for commenting on these, so you can add something at any time – you also don’t need to comment on them all or do them in order! The themes are a loose guide, but all discussion is welcome.
For the previous kick-off/goals post, check out: Small Web September: Kick-Off & Goals!
The theme of this week’s check-in is links! Earlier this year, I came across Coy (
osteophage)’s link compilation in praise of links, which led me down a rabbit hole of reading various essays about the importance of hyperlinking and being a good steward of the web. This includes not making your own site into an effective dead end, but sending people on to interesting destinations via links that you’ve included there. I’ve always been a lover of curating cool webpages and sites, but it struck me that I wasn’t actually doing much of this on my own little website – now, it’s a personal fanworks archive, so you could argue that linking out to random pages is a bit out of step with the purpose of it. However, it broadened my thinking about where I could start adding more links: from archiving rec lists to linking out to gifts that other fans had made for me over the years.
So, the discussion starter for this check-in is: how do you link, and to what? Do you have a link hub or set of interesting finds? Would you like to do more with links?
As a bonus: share some of your favourite interesting links (this can be anything from thought-provoking essays to just cool stuff! They don't need to be explicitly small-web-themed, although that's great too).
And of course, let us know how your Small Web September project(s) is/are going!
As a reminder, this is the first of four ‘check-in’/comment points that will be published during the event – you can check out the schedule and dates of these posts over on the event intro. There’s no cut-off point for commenting on these, so you can add something at any time – you also don’t need to comment on them all or do them in order! The themes are a loose guide, but all discussion is welcome.
For the previous kick-off/goals post, check out: Small Web September: Kick-Off & Goals!
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Date: 2025-09-10 07:40 pm (UTC)When it comes to links, there are a few things which come to mind…
A while back I came across aaron straup cope’s blogpost, continuous partial mythologies, which I definitely think is worth a read. But as far as this discussion goes, the important thing is that at the end of the post, it has a “This blog post is full of links.” disclaimer which links to a page that just… lists all the links in the post. I found this idea really interesting and think that with static site generators these days, you can do a lot better, and embed a list of most or all of the links on a page right at the bottom, maybe in a
<details>element if you like. What I have done in the past is scraped the page during generation for links with atitleattribute, and grabbed all of them and made their titles into the link text in the end.I think this is very use·ful, both to people returning to a page after reading it once (so they don’t have to hunt thru the page for a link they remember clicking), and also on the first read, since people may not want to break up their reading flow to click on a link and it’s good to provide another opportunity at the end. I of course want people to read the pages I link to (that’s why I link to them!), and having a list at the end of the page can help people find any that they have missed.
The second thing which must be stated when it comes to linking is that linking only works when people are good web citizens and make their pages linkable. A webpage is linkable if it has a URL which is accessible and does not change. In smallweb spaces sometimes people try to be edgy punks and go all “Cool URIs don’t matter who cares about maintenance or planning I’ll move my pages around every day”, but the people hurt by this are other smallweb folks who now have to go thru all of their links, find all of the dead ones, discover their new URLs, and update all of their pages. This is a lot of work and one of the biggest maintenance burdens to running a website, and one of the reasons that links pages stopped being a thing. It’s really important to put some planning and care into the URLs of your pages before you publish them, set up redirects for ones that you move, and generally do what you can to reduce the negative impact of your actions on other people. If 20 people have linked to your page, then by one URL change you have created work for 20 people!
Anybody who has run a website for a long time and cares about linking probably knows the flipside to this, which is that the number of redirects that you wind up having to maintain just to keep old links functioning can grow quite large quite fast and be its own kind of pain. There are some techniques and bestpractices for reducing this burden, but the most important thing is just to consider “does this seed have room to grow and change” before you go and plant it in a cramped corner of your garden.