For those familiar with Daring Fireball, or Tumblr sites like MG Siegler’s parislemon, or Marco Arment’s website, link posts are probably pretty familiar. I’ve noticed this trend more and more. Maybe I was missing something before – they’ve been on Daring Fireball as long as I can tell. I’ve always shared links that I find interesting on Twitter, but 140 characters isn’t usually enough to add my thoughts and Twitter doesn’t feel permanent at all.

What are link posts?

A link post is literally just a link attatched to an article. The heading is usually linked to the link that’s attached to the post instead of a permalink. They let you comment on another article in longer form than you would normally want to write in a comment. And, if the author of the site you’re linking to has pingbacks turned on, they’ll be notified of your post in the comments. It’s a useful way to share interesting links with your readers and let them know your thoughts as well.

Since I’ve implemented this feature for the next gernation of this site, and I’m running the new site internally, I decided to add the feature to the current generation theme. I’ve already posted some links, so you can check it out. This implementation isn’t necessarily exactly how it will be when the new version launches, but at least nobody is left wondering about any of the articles here. Currently, link posts are linked directly to the source article in the headline of the homepage and on the single post page. Both pages also have an arrow (→) at the end of the title, indicating that the link is going to take you to an external page.