About

What this is

Every link I have saved since August 2005, one page per link, and what connects them: the host, the year, the tags, the links that point at each other, and the issues of The Weekly Thing that carried them.

This isn't something that I do for the Weekly Thing but is instead something I've always done. The Weekly Thing is a result of this activity.

That is from How I Find Links, where I also wrote: "To me this feels like an ever growing database of knowledge."

This is my fourth attempt at doing something with that database, after a wiki in 2012 and a link blog from 2017 to 2021. In January 2024 I wrote: "I may create a link blog again in the future, but if I did I want it to not be blog-date-centric but instead content-keyword-search centric." So this one starts with a search box.

Why links matter

The fundamental building block of the web "isn't HTML or a web page"; "it is the link. The way that closed platforms fight links makes them feel rebellious to even use. Long live the hyperlink!" (Weekly Thing 352)

Most (all?) of the major social platforms have largely pushed the hyperlink, what I would suggest is the most fundamental thing about the web, out.

If a service does not support direct hyperlinking, without some scary warning, then we should understand that this is not a service that sees the web as a friend.

Both are from Weekly Thing 295. And from two decades ago: "I would have never guessed that linking to websites, with no URL redirection or tracking tags, would feel almost subversive now."

How it is made

Static pages, built with Astro and searched with Pagefind. Every link's page has a JSON twin and a Markdown twin. There are feeds for the newest links and for every host and every kind, llms.txt files for language models, every link in links.json, and the same public data as one SQLite file, links.db.

The site, its tools and its data are open source at github.com/jthingelstad/links.thingelstad.xyz. The Kudos button on each link's page is counted by Tinylytics. Agents built it with me on October 23, 2026.