My approach to running a link blog from Simon Willison
I decided to follow simon’s approach to creating a link blog, where I can share interesting links I find on the internet along with my own comments and thoughts about them.
I have been following Simon for a long time because of the content he shares about AI. I often notice that he shares well-written blog posts with direct links to the original sources, along with his own thoughts on the topic, and sometimes even his own code snippets. I think this is an excellent way to share knowledge while also keeping a personal record. It’s much better than simply saving something to Readwise to read later and leaving a few highlights or dull comments like “interesting.”
From this article:
The point of that article was to emphasize that blogging doesn’t have to be about unique insights. The value is in writing frequently and having something to show for it over time—worthwhile even if you don’t attract much of an audience (or any audience at all).
I have to admit that this is often the biggest obstacle preventing me from writing new posts. Whenever I want to write about a topic, I usually find myself asking: Is it worth creating a new post? Is it unique enough? Is it valuable enough? Or is it just a waste of time for my readers?
Simon believes it’s more valuable to “write frequently and have something to show for it over time—worthwhile.” I will give this a try to see if it truly works for me.
That’s the purpose of my link blog: it’s an ongoing log of things I’ve found—effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.
Oh, I like this idea and that’s why we are here.
I try to add something extra. My goal with any link blog post is that if you read both my post and the source material you’ll have an enhanced experience over if you read just the source material itself.
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I might tie it together to other similar concepts, including things I’ve written about in the past, for example linking Prompt caching with Claude to my coverage of Context caching for Google Gemini.
That’s really useful. In fact, it truly makes this blog more valuable. My current understanding is that I can add more background or another source to complement the original one. I will make an effort to do this in the future.
