Link Link

One thing that’s increasingly irritated me (to the irrational extent that I’m bothering to tell you about it) is Boing Boing’s use of stupid little Link links at the end of each entry. It’s less accessible (screen-readers’ link lists are made useless), less search-engine-friendly (the same word is associated with every URL), and less usable than common-sense descriptive linking.

I’ve spent years working to rid sites of ‘click here’-type rubbish, so it’s disappointing that a popular, web-savvy weblog is one of the worst culprits around.

Link

Mon 17th Jan 2005, 8:22pm GMT

Filed under: Rants and Grumbles, Web, Weblogs

Comments

Hmm. I'm not sure I like just a plain old "Link" either, but I think the way you do the permalinks here are probably worse actually. Your permalinks are displayed as the date/time of the post (which, in my opinion, does not give any clue as to what the link does).
Personally, I like the word "Permalink" for permalinks (even though some plebians don't know what it means) and I like something like this for links to the outside:
Read More at _______

— Mike D., 17th Jan, 11:20pm

Oooooooh, I do like how you pull the .ico from the commenters' URLs!!! That is nice!

— Mike D., 17th Jan, 11:22pm

Those 'Link' links aren't permalinks though, they're the actual main featured links of the content.
I'm not entirely comfortable with date/time as permalink, but it's a convention many weblogs have adopted, and makes use of information specific to that entry, so it seemed OK. You're right though, it's too obscure for some users, I'll see if I can improve it.
(see http://www.malevolent.com/weblog/a… for info about the little icons)

— Matt Round, 18th Jan, 7:11am

Personally I'd prefer it if instead of "link" they'd use "source: <full URL>" or "original article/source: <full URL>".
The full URL bit could be truncated of course for super long URLs to save space on sites with small content areas.
I love your site's design. :-)

— o-juice, 19th Jan, 3:51am

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