We’re trying something new around here. Since we have so many posts, there’s a lot of internal linking between posts. This linking has value because it can point you to other things you may be interested in.
You see, you can only link to something in the past – it needs to exist when you’re writing or editing the page. But what about something you write and then link to multiple times? Knowing what has been written after the item that you’re looking at, that links back to it, is something you may want to know.
To this end, we’ve created a script that runs every night and parses the text of every entry on this site, extracts all the internal hyperlinks, and traces them back to the posts they link to. (Yes, I thought about using referrers. That would probably work too. But that requires someone to click on the link, and that struck me as a fuzzy way of doing things.)
So, in a lot of posts, right under the text and before the comments, you’ll see something like this:
Take a look around and see if you like it. We will have some issues with Markdown appearing in the previews, but it’s largely in place. It seems to have value – it’s very good at pointing you at something related to what you’re looking at which you might be interested in reading. And that’s really the trick to get visitors deeper into the site.
As an added bonus, here are the top five posts on this site by number of internal links pointing to them. The winner is no surprise, if you’ve been around here for a while. Click on any of these things to see lots of “What Links Here” results, if you want examples.