Teeny little blogging related moan. Attribution for links is a good thing. It shows humility and gives credit to the person who showed you the link to begin with. An absence of attribution implies that you found the link yourself and if that’s not true then you accrue bad karma. (The exception being those links that spread so fast you can’t narrow it down to one or two people.)
But that’s not my moan.
The other use of attribution is it gives your readers a chance to check out the source of your link where they may find further information on that topic or other links of interest. For example, if you found the link on MetaFilter there’s a good chance the discussion there will be of interest.
So here, finally, is my moan.
For the love of all that may or may not be holy depending on your degree of faith in holy things, please link to the actual post! Saying you got the link from MeFi, or Boing Boing, or some other uber-blog site that has 100 posts a day, but merely linking to the home page is next to useless. It’s like:
“Do you like my new scarf?”
“Oh, that’s nice. I’d like a scarf like that.”
“Yeah, I got it from a shop in Oxford St”
“Which shop?”
“Not telling.”
“WTF?”
“That’s right. Despite drawing your attention to the scarf I’m going to force you to visit every shop in Oxford St that might or might not sell scarfs should you want to get one of your own, and I’m not doing this out of malice. Actually I’ve no idea why I’m doing this.”
C’mon people. The permalink was invented a good six years ago for a reason.
Moan over.
Oops. That would be aimed at me.
I got the cartoon in, but forgot about the attribution. Sorry about that.
Three further comments:
1. What’s a permalink?
Permalinks, trackbacks, feeds and all manner of other terms.
All unhelpfully described by jargon-mongers at Wikipedia.
A simple How-to would be sufficient.
A simple click and paste would be even better.
2. Why is it that comment fields and functions are small, plain text, and rarely editable after posting?
You’d think that blog/CMS builders would extend htmlarea functions to the comments box, and that they’d figure out how to let authors edit their comments after the fact.
3. Fashion Rule No. 4: Never reveal your sources.
If I was the scarf owner in your example I would lie through my teeth rather than let on where I’d got it.
In fact, I have a lovely cap/scarf combo from Copenhagen, but if you asked me where I got them, I’d lie.
I’d say they came from Retro Bizarre in Moseley.
No way do I want to come across anyone else wearing my signature garments!
Ohh I do that too…
I guess a quick right-click, copy link location (Firefox) would do the job but.. well.. if I DO link to something I spotted on Boing Boing (which I did recently) then chances are most people will have seen it, even if not on Boing Boing but on another site that got it from them.
Yes it’s lazy and presumptious. My bad.
Will try harder.
(Ya moany git)
I’ve looked into this a bit more, and have now written my own somewhat-longer-than-a-comment findings at
What’s a permalink?
The upshot is that it would be nice to have a script/extension/function that produced a standard (via) link from a given webpage. Anybody seen one lying around?
Kinda scary that you needed to do that. I thought the concept of a “permalink” was pretty well known.
There’s a bit of history involved. In the beginning all weblogs consisted of a main index and monthly archives which contained multiple posts in chronological order. Before Movable Type popularised the Individual archive page (such as this page here) there was a need to be able to link to a post that was part of a page and for that link to be permanent. So each post was assigned a unique ID number and the URL used to link to it took you to the monthly archive.
For example, here’s a permalink for Diamond Geezer (who is resolutely old school in this regard):
http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_diamondgeezer_archive.html#113962370568142265
It’s a bit of a mess (thanks to a clunky system introduced by Blogger a long time ago) but the important bit is the #113962370568142265. This unique ID ensures that when the page is loaded the screen moves to the post in question, regardless of what has been added above or below it. This URL is appended to the end of the post so that should you need to find or link to that post you can do so with that address.
Nowadays most blogs have their posts archived on individual pages so the permalink is a basic URL, but the principle is the same.
Simple, really.