I’ve been putting link posts up on here for a little over two weeks now, and I’ve been really enjoying it. Just briefly, though, I though I’d write up a little list of what I’ve learned since starting the link-blogging, and also ask my illustrious readers how you think it’s been going. Answers in the comments, if anyone manages to read down that far!

Anyway, in no particular order and with very little editing, on with the list goodness!

  1. I much prefer links to a blogroll. The blogroll on this site disappeared for unknown reasons among the hijinks when I moved servers recently (anyone else noticed how much faster this site is since then?). Because of my linked list, however, I haven’t really felt the need to put it back – and in fact I removed the link to the blogroll during a slight reshuffle of my theme. Bottom line: if I link to something on Sharpe’s Opinion, it means I think you should read it. Preferably Now. That makes the linked list blogroll in itself.
  1. Lists of links are not very me. Iain Dale and Letters From a Tory (who very kindly linked to one of my posts recently, many thanks) and a few other bloggers publish a list of posts that have caught their eye every day. In Dale’s case it’s the brilliantly titled ‘Daley Dozen’, LFaT has the also brilliantly titled ‘Five First Class Posts’. I’m not sure I could do that, though – what if I couldn’t find five really good posts on a particular day? What if I had 6? What if I couldn’t be bothered one day? I think the unstructured flow of links with snarky comments attached which I’ve been doing suits my style better.
  1. Link Posts need to look different. Setting up the site to do link posts was a bit of a technical and design challenge in itself – and I still haven’t quite got it fully sorted. In particular, having the post titles link to the article I’m talking about makes a big difference in my mind (and it’s actually a cheat – what really happens is that the titles of link posts aren’t displayed, so I just have to make sure that the first line of the post is a link). There are subtler differences to distinguish link posts from full articles, too – all with the aim of making the link posts look right as shorter articles, while the full-length articles don’t look out of place alongside.
  1. It’s sometimes hard to decide what kind of post I’m writing. For Example, my recent post ‘More than One Kind of Abuse‘ started as a link post. As I wrote it and realised that I had a lot to say on the subject and wanted to make some serious points, the post developed into something which I felt deserved a title of its own. There’s a fine line to tread between link posts and articles, and sometimes it gets blurred. I haven’t quite figured this one out fully yet.
  1. You have to read a lot to link a lot. I read nearly 70 different blogs regularly, and there’s nobody else who reads exactly the same blogs and finds exactly the same things interesting. The linked list is the web, filtered through my interests. It’s like I’m doing the hard work, so you don’t have to! At the same time, in order to keep the momentum I’ve had to cast my net further and wider than I had been in the past – and I’m very glad to have done so. I’ve been going through other people’s blogrolls and the posts they’ve been linking to and avidly scraping up blogs to put in my feed reader. My ‘New Intake’ folder has some real gems – including Patently Rubbish, Angels in Marble, Ambush Predator, Rands in Repose and Don’t Mess With Me, I’m From Luton. Looking for material to link to has forced me to find some more of the really good blogs out there, and that’s a Good Thing.
  1. Linking makes blogging more interesting. I don’t feel quite so much like I’m shouting from a pulpit for no particular reason while writing this blog anymore – I feel like I’m creating an interesting website about the things I have read and enjoyed. It feels less selfish. What’s more, because I don’t feel I need to construct a whole post around a link, I post more of them, more often, and enjoy it more.
  1. Send people away and they’ll come back. It seems counter-intuitive, but really it follows on from the last point: The more I link away, the more people come here. Since starting linking out, my pageviews have more than tripled, my visitors have doubled, and the amount of feedback and people commenting has grown noticeably. Modesty forces me to say that this of course is not the reason I blog, but it’s nice to have some solid validation in the form of an increase of traffic. I think this is at least in part simply because I’m posting more, which means there’s more to come here for. Also, owners of blogs I link to come along and see what I’ve written (and you’re most welcome to stay and have a look around). I hope, though, that the rolling list of stuff I’ve enjoyed on the internet also makes my blog more interesting, which is exactly what I’ve been striving for all along.