Backlinks Added to the Blog

Everytime I mention, think of, and link to Andy Matuschak’s public notes, I really like how each note displays a list of backlinks at the bottom.

In my note-taking, I don’t want backlinks to be added automatically into the content. I can get by with other means just fine to figure out what links to the current note.

But for a hypertextual publication, adding a list of backlinks at the bottom is a neat tool to explore more, to find the beginning of an article series, or related items in general.

So I added a little section to posts on this blog. Not every page, just the posts.

Example: Check out a post with a couple of backlinks, including this post: How Do You Activate Sparkle’s XPC Services?

I’ll keep this around for a while and see how it affects finding the stuff I’m usually looking for on my own blog. More cross-connections make discovery in a publication easier, I’d argue.