A while ago I added a /links
slashpage
as a way of bookmarking some of the things I read and sharing them with the world.
Funny enough, I’ve used that page more than my actual browser’s bookmarks. For some of the same uses too. I want to share a link to an article I read in a chat? No problem, I just pull up /links and there it is.
I started with something very bare bones, just a big old list of links with no adornment. The advantage of that of course is that it is low friction. This is one of those activities that needs to be as quick and casual as possible to actually get done. Copying and pasting into one big file served that.
But am I satisfied? No . I’ve reworked it so that now I have the option of adding a comment to the links. As is often the case in computers, seemingly simple changes can have surprising implications. The way I approached it means that now each bookmark has it’s own page, though the big list is still the main way to use them. That’s all well and good.
But then something I didn’t expect happened. Strictly speaking, it’s a bug. The code is doing something I did not intend it to. But I like it. Sometimes you can just decide that bugs are actually features. What happened is that the bookmark pages got picked up by the On This Day feature of my site. That means that not only does every post have a list of links to other posts made on the same date, it has a list of the bookmarks I’ve made too. I love this as a way of adding some context of what I was reading at the time to my posts. It’s the kind of thing that I wish I had thought to do on purpose.