The other day Wesley left a comment on one of my posts to let me know that they referenced it in one of their recent posts, “How Websites Die“.
I think it is so cool that by them leaving a comment, my post now has a link to their post which links back to mine, like a mirror.
Most links are one-directional, and we don’t really know who is linking to us if not for analytics.
Note-taking apps like Roamresearch call them backlinks – two links that reference each other. Wouldn’t it be cool there is a standard way of displaying backlinks from someone else’s website? WordPress does this with trackbacks, but as far as I know they only work with other wordpress sites. Then there is Indieweb’s webmentions, but everytime I take a look to see if I can implement it, it just sounds a little too complicated. I wish there was a simple way for everyone to do it.
We could then have a way to display conversations that take place over a series of blog posts from different websites. Or a themed chain of blog posts from different sources.
If you didn’t know this, I implemented this sort of linking within my website. It doesn’t show up in RSS for now but on my website below this post you could see I linked to the original post that Wesley commented on, and if you navigate to that post it links back to this note. So I can personally keep track of the contextual relationships within my own content. I just think it’ll be cool to do so with other people’s blogs too.