About a year ago, I noticed that I wasn’t writing enough blog posts but still wanted to share stuff in my blog. Thus I started the link category like other blogs such as DaringFireball, Hivelogic, Shawn Blanc, etc.
My biggest concern has been both attribution and showing too much to steal visits from the content creator. I know how much I cherish people’s visits to my blog, thus taking their thunder away would just be hypocritical.
For some time I’ve debated on the proper way to link to items. Some blogs, like DaringFireball and Hivelogic add the links to the content they linking via the title(example). So if you are a typical RSS reader user, you’ll see the linker’s comments and highlights in your RSS in the post and clicking on the article’s title takes you directly to the content being linked and not their site. The link to their site would be in the bottom usually named permalink or some unicode character. This is by far the most respectful method and convenient for reader.
Another way is actually the default for MarEdit’s send to blog(from browser or NetNewsWire) which is the one I’ve been doing until now. Basically you end the post with either a (Via Example.) or (Link Example.) depending on what it is.
Although this last method is proper and correctly attributes the creator of the content I’ve always wondered if people actually click through. Bear in mind, that I don’t really have that many subscribers, but it’s still important to both make it easy for the reader and link through correctly.
That is why today I’ve started linking in a whole new different way(following Shaun Blanc’s example). I will add the link to the content in question at the top, and the title as the text in the link. If I read the content via someone else’s blog, I will attribute them in the bottom through the Via method suggested before. The title will still link back to my site. This way, readers will see the link first hand and still see my comments(if they want to) and get attribution to the finder of the content(if any).
Please let me know if you agree, you don’t or just want to tell me how cool the new icecrums design is.
No comments yet.