Feature Suggestion: Permalinks for linkblog posts

14 views

Skip to first unread message

Nathan F.

unread,

Mar 9, 2012, 11:18:28 PM3/9/12

to river2...@googlegroups.com

This feature is a bit hard to explain without providing a little background info first...

A number of sites -- Hacker News, Daring Fireball, and Marco.org, for a few good examples -- publish linkblog posts whose headlines point not to the site itself, but out to the article being discussed. These linkblog posts often contain additional commentary in the body of the post (or in the case of Hacker News, this is where the HN reader comments thread is).

River2 by design usually truncates or omits this commentary entirely, which is good because if it didn't, the "river" would become far less skim-able.

But I still want to read that additional commentary that's currently being omitted.

My suggestion is to make the "permalinks" to these linkblog posts visible.

This is, in fact, how Hacker News firehose posts work: The headline link points out to the article and a separate "Comment" permanent link points to the Hacker News comments thread -- effectively, the HN permalink.

Both Daring Fireball and Marco.org include permanent links in their respective feed items, too, at the bottom of each linkblog post. (Daring Fireball uses a unicode star with URLs that all begin "daringfireball.net/linked/"; Marco.org uses a "Permalink" preceded by a unicode infinity).

Ideally, River2 would identify these permalinks (perhaps DF's and Marco's unicode symbols could serve as permalink identifiers) and place them at the end of or below the (outbound-linking) headline. That is, just like the way Hacker News posts are displayed in River2.

I recognize this "feature" would give River2 extra work and would kind of alter how these sites' feed items appear. But it seems every day a new site implements this exact linkblog scheme: Headline links out, permalink links in. (Techmeme, for instance, does this on their site but, regrettably, it's not reflected in their feed like it is in HN, DF, and Marco's feeds.)

I hope that made sense. Thank you for listening,

--Nate

Ted Howard

unread,

Mar 10, 2012, 2:06:46 PM3/10/12

to river2...@googlegroups.com, river2...@googlegroups.com

My blog also works in this manner. My rss feed uses the "link" tag for the link to the article I'm referencing. The guid (isPermalink=true) tag points to the permalink in my site with my comments.