One year of publishing “Blend of links” posts

After almost a year and 12 posts in this blog’s new category “Blend of links,” I’ve shared a total of roughly 120 links with you, dear readers, all without having to write anything of substance (which takes time I may not have, and like I said before, I’m lazy).

In September 2023, I added this blog post format because I wanted to be able to share simple links without requiring me to produce a full 1,000-word post. This is what I usually write when I have something of value to say about something, a comment to make, a point to add, or else, I still publish regular articles. For many links I encounter, I don’t have much more to add than a single sentence.

These posts, and each of their little paragraph entries, are basically what I would tweet if I still had my account. They are a compilation of little posts that other bloggers are calling “micro” or “notes” and, to an extent, what I would share if I had a newsletter like the excellent Meanwhile. The Blend of links posts are, in their own way, segments of what Gruber used to call the “linked list” on Daring Fireball.

I’ve always liked this light, easy to make format, and until a few years ago, this blog featured small articles like that. I decided to stop for two main reasons:

1. The way the home page was redesigned circa 2021 — i.e. with subtitles — wasn’t really working for very short posts.
2. Managing two types of feed in one blog felt like too much work: how to label them? How should it appear on the menuK? etc.

Every day, I spend a lot of time online browsing the internet. RSS feeds, websites, newsletters, blogs: I read a lot of cool things, and I find some of them to be worth sharing on the Jolly Teapot, but most of them don’t inspire me to write a full article. Before serving them to the few readers of this blog, I let them brew, saved and tagged as “blend” in GoodLinks, until the end of each month arrives and I then work on organising the ones that will make the cut.

For each “Blend” list, I try to make the selection of links diverse enough: for instance, they can’t all be from the same few sources, and they can’t all be about the same topics. Sometimes it’s quite a struggle to find a good balance, but this also pushes me to be more curious and highlight stuff that I would otherwise overlook, or never curate to appear in the list.

Obviously, readers of this blog share many of my interests, so I refrain from sharing stuff from websites I suspect many of you already follow. The best example of that has to be the wonderful blog of Jason Kottke. Most of the things featured on his blog are the best kind of “Blend of links” material. But what would be the point of me sharing several links from Kottke each month if readers are already familiar with them? I feel like I need to make each list feature at least one or two websites 99% of readers have never seen before. Also, I allow myself only one link per source in each edition.

Speaking of Kottke.org, I’m getting “kottked” quite often these past few weeks. This is when I find something cool or interesting, something niche, something that I immediately save thinking “ooh… This will make a nice entry in this month’s Blend of links” until Jason — with his amazing talent for discovering cool things — finds it and shares it. When this happens, I usually delete the previously saved link thinking “well, this had to go: this has already been discovered, and it has limited value in this list now.” This pushes me to find new things and it nourishes my curiosity.

Speaking of sources, I try as much as I can to credit people through whom I discover links, by a little “via” snippet at the end of an entry, but sometimes I forget to write it down when saving the link and when the day arrives when I share the link, I don’t know where I found out about it first. I’m sorry for those forgotten.

This monthly collection of links now feels like a legitimate part of this blog, an extra layer on my written words, that I ended up loving to do. I believe I will continue publishing them for a while. I may adjust the format a little, to make it more flexible for me to edit and easier to read, but this experimentation will be done on a month-to-month basis.

Maybe one day I’ll even go back to publishing shorter posts — like in the old days — instead of these “Blend of links” lists but for now, I’m quite happy with this monthly format. Of course my main focus remains on the bigger articles, where I try to make sense of my thoughts using my keyboard, like I’m doing right now.

In the meantime, thanks for reading.