Hark, a link blog!

Storing and sharing links is something that I've been doing in parallel with blogging for like 25 years. Sometimes it's just a link, and sometimes sharing a link turns into a full blog post.

My last spate of dedicated ink share was my "journal" format, which are microblog length posts on my own site at https://bmannconsulting.com/journal/ 0, but regular old Bluesky posts have been sucking up my microblog energy.

For a while I used @micro.blog to syndicate those journal posts, I made some custom RSS feeds and cross posted them with @fedica.com , which can suck them in and then auto schedule and cross post them0.

Semble

Recently, my link blogging energy has been going into @semble.so

Boris (bmann.ca) — Semble

Web tinkerer. Pooling capital and collaboration. What if we made things a little bit better?

Just realized I just crossed over 500 links stored!

BTW, I still very much use the digital garden notes on my site . The home page shows the ten most recently modified local notes, so you can see I've done a bunch of home lab stuff recently:

I've lobbied the Semble team for link blog support — I'm already writing a note for close to 100% of the links I store. Here's my write up from April , plus I made a Link Blogging collection on Semble, since apparently the format is not that well known any more:

Link Blogging (by Boris) — Semble

Examples of implementations of link blogging and meta commentary on the practice of it

Skyreader adds link blogs

I had tried Skyreader but mostly I've fallen off the RSS bandwagon, and of course have been enjoying our Atmosphere subscriptions through @standard.site . Skyreader's recent update adds Standard Site discovery and subscribing AND LINK BLOGGING!

So I tried it all out and only then went back and read the announce post, and realized that Skyreader dev @disnetdev.com had put all my blogs right in the article:

And, uh, since I write for so many other spaces0, have this backlog of links in Semble, and so on...my poor blogs0 are a little empty0.

Link blogs should point to the link

Because I've been link blogging and RSS consuming for a long time, I have opinions about link blogs!

I took a look at the RSS format, and here's my entry where I share the Skyreader announcement announcement.

The item contains a link to my commentary on my Skyreader link blog, and then has a link at the bottom of the entry of the thing I'm adding commentary about.

<item>
Skyreader update - Linkblogs, standard.site, and discussions
https://linkblogs.skyreader.app/did%3Aplc%3A2cxgdrgtsmrbqnjkwyplmp43/mq2zdjsuezhmjemljb
<guid isPermaLink="false">at://did:plc:2cxgdrgtsmrbqnjkwyplmp43/site.standard.document/mq2zdjsuezhmjemljb</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:25:04 GMT</pubDate>
<description> I’ve just been excitedly using the new Skyreader discover feature to properly add the many people I want to be following and THEN reading the updates post to find that I’m being used as an example 😄

I’ve been bugging @semble.so to enable link blogging there, too!

Great work @disnet.dev (please add mention support!)
Making Skyreader more social. Everyone gets a linkblog! Find your people.
Read the full article on skyreader-dev.leaflet.pub </description>
</item>

That's not how link blogs should work! I'm basically saying "go read this thing" plus a few comments on this. The should be the link of the thing I'm making commentary on, and you can have a subtle permalink to my commentary in the footer. It's quite literally a feed of links to elsewhere, not just another blog RSS.

One of the most famous / longest running link blogs is John Gruber's Daring Fireball . Here's a recent post, where the link-being-talked-about is right at the top. The star is the permalink for the comment on his site:

And here's the feed source for that entry:

<entry>
Nieman Journalism Lab: Twitter/X Punishes Accounts That Post Links



<id>tag:daringfireball.net,2026:/linked//6.43093</id>
<published>2026-06-05T20:46:56Z</published>
<updated>2026-06-05T20:46:57Z</updated>
<author>
<name>John Gruber</name>
<uri>http://daringfireball.net/</uri>
</author>
<content type="html" xml:base="https://daringfireball.net/linked/" xml:lang="en">
Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April: I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: Bloomberg, CNN, Forbes, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. Nine don’t: Al Jazeera English, AP, BBC, Breitbart News, CBS News, Daily Wire, Fox News, NBC News, and Reuters. The last three accounts I looked at — Leading Report, unusual_whales, and Globe Eye News — are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report tweet: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts. These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are. Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice. ★
</content>
</entry>

Technically a bunch of links, but the first one goes to the article itself, and then the permalink is further down.

Aside from my rant here of how it should work, let's talk to @fedica.com to get this working really well with their RSS ingestion .

A few other requests:

@-mention and rich text links for link notes

let me map a domain to my link blog — I'd want links.bmannconsulting.com

for regular Skyreader, when sharing to Semble I want to add a comment / create a note in Semble. I think you can probably combine your link blog share with share to semble?

Regardless, great job on this Tim @disnetdev.com — great to see your continued work on Skyreader.

I'm already a sponsor, what are you waiting for dear reader and future link-blogger???