[animaomnium]

Thank you for taking the time to read the post and write a thoughtful reply. You make a good point: it is hard to find good links. These links suck. I apologize for this poor first-order approximation: I want to link to stuff interesting enough to merit a post or two in their own right.

To that end, I keep a list of every interesting thing that I read. I plan to index that list, and make it searchable. Reliance on a search engine is a stop-gap to keep scope sensible at this point. There's nothing stopping other people from taking this idea and running with it.

Given your personal involvement in this area, I understand your apprehension. Like you, I want to see a denser, more interesting web. But without tools to overcome the static friction of linking things together, I don't think we'll see density and utility of links increase any more than it already has. That's what I hoped to highlight in this piece.

[leephillips]

Well, I appreciate that you’re thinking about the problem of linking in general and writing about it. If finding and inserting appropriate links is laborious—well, so is writing. Linking is part of the process—part of the content. You can’t automate it away.

Like most HN readers, I've written my own content/information management system, and this makes keeping track of sources and inserting/formatting links much easier. Almost a pleasure, in fact. But there are plenty of open-source and other products out there designed to help with this task.

[joelfried]

> Almost a pleasure, in fact

Could you elaborate a bit on your workflow that makes it almost enjoyable? My personal workflow can always use an upgrade and I'd love to hear what works for you!

[leephillips]

Very briefly, it depends on Pandoc with citeproc, and vim (lately nvim) with the vim-markdown plugin, which adds hiding to citeproc links, making the text easier to read in the editor.

Next I have bibliographic information on every source that I use stored in a postgres database. I have a collection of scripts (in lua, python, bash, ...) so I can do what I want within the editor: supply a URL and have some information scraped from the page and stored in a note, one file per resource, with bibliographic information in YAML blocks and anything else that I want to add. Another script stores the important information from the YAML blocks into the database. I have a script that builds a bibtex file from the citeproc links in my document, for formatting bibliographies in the final version. I can generate HTML, PDF, DOCX, or plain text from the same source.

The pleasure comes from having a set of keyboard shortcuts that let me jump instantly from a citeproc tag to my notes file, a local copy of the resource, or the copy on the web; also to search for notes with keywords, and a few more things. I can select part of my text and hit two keys to transform it into plain text or HTML with properly formatted links and references.

For each notes file corresponding to a resource another keyboard shortcut brings up the list of articles referring to it, and I have a script to draw a graphviz graph of this reference network.

I’ve built this up over the years; it’s a mess and no one else should use it. Maybe I’ll clean it up some day. It’s really paying off now for me though: I’m writing a book with about 50 references for each chapter; it would be unmanageable without some kind of system.

I know that there’s Zotero and other systems out there. But I prefer that this work in the peculiar way that I like; these systems tend to become brain extensions and are somewhat personal.

[joelfried]

It's definitely personal, and hearing what you prioritize and why helps. Thanks!

[cratermoon]

> I plan to index that list, and make it searchable.

You could do that, or you could use one of the reference managers that already exist and do this for you. At the very least, try out a few and see what features they offer. If none of them work for you out-of-the-box, perhaps try out what extensions and customizations exist, or create your own. EndNote, Mendeley and Zotero are popular. EasyBib.com and RefWorks also come to mind. Most of these work with browsers and website to make adding and cataloging references easy.

[twic]

I wonder if you could change the tool to search your browser history, rather than the web. That way, it's more likely to pick up the things you actually read before writing the post.