Skin Of Stars: Web is links

Web is links
Wednesday, June 07, 2006

I'm not sure how comfortable I feel at the moment in positioning myself as the Thanet Bloggers geek guru after reading a resume like this. Still, I've made my bed and never let it be said that I'm not one to lie in it.

As laid out by the internets founding father, Tim Berners-Lee, the web is so called because of the use of links. Rather than having to go to a central repository of indexed information we find our way following links placed on sites. Not everything shows up on front page Google, so we follow these little alleys and at times we find gems.

I've seen a few of my fellow bloggers here having problems with links. It's easy enough for most of us to make links in our posts. A case of highlighting the text we want as a link, clicking the little world with a chain next to the T with a colour pallete in the create post window and cutting and pasting the address from the address bar into the pop-up. More info here.

The problem most people seem to have is putting links into the blogs sidebar. There is no quick easy way with this. You're going to have to get down and dirty with the code you find on your template page. Near the bottom of this code you'll find the links you already have on the side, they say things like 'edit me' or 'google news'. All you have to do is replace these with similar like information for your own links. Just make sure you re-publish your entire blog. Anyhows, the good people of blogger have provided instructions for this.

Funny though. When I first started all this blogging it seemed we all tended to just add any local blogging link. Now there are a few more of us it's giving us the choice to be a bit pickier, if we want. I would certainly feel uncomfortable removing a link once I had one. Funny really, despite the webs percieved anonymity, you don't want to hurt peoples feelings, no matter what you think of them. Hmm, risky topic this, think I'll move on.

My point of writing this is that I feel if we have our own webspace, like the blog, we should be providing links to stuff we like, or not. Things we find usefull, or even pointless. But for the sake of being able to find things we would of anyway, we should link. I guess thats why I like sites like del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site.

Here, I've banged on about links now so I'll give you one that you would never have searched for: Ian's 17 steps

posted by SkinOfStars @ 7:08 pm,

3 Comments:

At June 08, 2006 11:19 am, Anonymous said...: Good point about links. I've always put the ones I visit most frequently in my list. It's really just a convenient way for me to browse. Now that there's an excellent and independent Thanet blog list, I use that quite a lot as a jumping off point too. Plus it brings blogs to my attention that I might have missed otherwise.
At June 09, 2006 10:13 pm, Tony Flaig said...: I am pretty confident that you must be geek and a good one at that; my criteria is if I understand some of what you write but not most, then you must be at the top of your game.

That biography was the condensed version, what does the full version look like frankly non of us are worthy
At June 15, 2006 6:28 pm, Anonymous said...: the thing is dude, that blogging, and social networking in general can only be used by 'normal people' when it goes main streem, people like us that understand how to code or at least the basics see the internet in a whole differnet way than regular users.

no matter how people like lucy birman say that the internet (porn in the case of her theis) has come to the masses. geeks are still the ones who program the shit in the first place.

the thing i would say about adding links to the page. is learn try as hard as you can to put thoes links on. unlike mose geeks who say if u cant do it fuck off..

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