<p>World’s on fire and the ghouls keep buying matches, so I’m working on my website.</p> <p>At the end of last week, I launched <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/stream/">a very basic “links and sundries” page</a>. Pretty much ever since I joined Twitter (<a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/post-by-post/">valē</a>), social media has always been where I’ve shared links I find interesting or inspiring. I’ve always wanted a more permanent solution<span class="w"> —</span> or more permanent-<em>feeling</em>, anyway; what’s a link’s average lifespan these days?<span class="w"> —</span> so I built one for my website.</p> <p>When I say “very basic,” I mean <em>very basic</em>. When I first launched it <a href="https://follow.ethanmarcotte.com/@beep/114711828190286574">last Thursday night</a>, each link was generated from a Markdown file I’d created in a folder. Heck, the page <a href="https://follow.ethanmarcotte.com/@beep/114711875573224288">didn’t even have an RSS feed</a> when it first went live. (<a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/stream/feed.xml">It has one now</a>, if that’s your thing.) I’ve spent the intervening days trying to spruce the place up.</p> <p>As of today, everything in <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/stream/">the links section</a> is pulled in from a bookmarking service called <a href="https://raindrop.io/">Raindrop.io</a>. That’s due entirely to <a href="https://localghost.dev/">Sophie Koonin</a>, who wrote an <em>excellent</em> <a href="https://localghost.dev/blog/automated-weekly-links-posts-with-raindrop-io-and-eleventy/">post showing how she uses Raindrop.io and Eleventy to automatically generate her weekly link posts</a>. Without Sophie’s stellar tutorial, I would’ve been stuck cobbling together Markdown files by hand, like some sort of feral woodland creature. <sup class="footnote-ref"><a class="footnote" href="#fn-creatures" id="fnref-fn-creatures" aria-labelledby="title-footnotes">1</a></sup> 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.</p> <p>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<span class="w"> —</span> 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.</p> <p>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<span class="w"> —</span> 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 <em>me</em>. I think I’d like to keep it that way, at least for now. Because in a small way, it feels like <a href="https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/coming-home">coming home</a>.</p> <hr /> <div class="footnotes flow"> <h2 class="hed-footnotes has-dash" id="title-footnotes">Footnote</h2> <ol><li id="fn-creatures" class="footnote-item"><p>You know. Like a marmot that, uh, hoards text files. Just like that. (I’m so tired.) <a href="#fnref-fn-creatures" class="reversefootnote">↩︎</a></p> </li> </ol> </div>
<hr /> <p>This has been “<a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/link-bug/">Link bug.</a>” a post from <a href="https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/">Ethan’s journal.</a></p> <p><a href="mailto:listener+rss@ethanmarcotte.com?subject=Reply%20to:%20“Link bug.”">Reply via email</a></p>