Posts tagged “backlink”
RE: Backlinks Should Be Context-Rich
Jared Gorski wrote a response to my article “Backlinks are bad links”. Since it’s a short and concise response, a re-response is warranted. He summarised my point fairly and sufficiently, so I don’t need to repeat myself here. If you are not familiar, please read the article linked above. I’ll reply to Jared’s post point by point.
Backlinking Is Not Very Useful -- Often Even Harmful
Disclaimer: I talked with Christian about what backlinks are. I don’t mean it as a technical concept like software and web developers would use the term. To me, a backlink is a link that allows you to go to files that refer to the very note you are looking at. Practically, it does not matter how the backlink is generated, by hand or presented to you by your software. Automatic backlinks are not only automatic when there is software that is showing them for you. If you create a backlink apparatus by habit it is still automatic. The automatization software would then be in your head.
Insert a List of Backlinks Into All Your Notes
Andy Matuschak shared a script called note-link-janitor with us the other day that maintains a list of backlinks in all of your Markdown notes. And yes, by “maintains” I really mean “maintains”: if it doesn’t exist, it adds a ## Backlinks section at the end of each Zettel with a list of incoming links, and it updates the section on subsequent runs. This means you can run the script as often as you’d like, and it always produces an up-to-date result – as opposed to, say, naively adding a new ## Backlink section time and time again. When you run the script regularly, you’ll always have an up-to-date backlink list in your notes. Neat.