One of my 2025 resolutions is doing things that don’t scale and doing them faster without overthinking. The idea is to focus on doing more while worrying less about scalability and sustainability in the things I do outside of work. With that in mind, I’ve been thinking for a while about tracking some of my out-of-band activities on this blog. The goal is to:

  • List the things I do, books and articles I read, and talks I grok.
  • Add some commentary or quote something I liked from the content, verbatim, for posterity.
  • Not spam people who just want to read the regular articles.
  • Not turn into a content junkie, churning out slop I wouldn’t want to read myself.

This isn’t about getting more eyeballs on what I publish. It’s about tracking what I do so I can look back at the end of the year and enjoy a nice little lull of accomplishment. Plus, having a place to post stuff regularly nudges me to read more, explore more, and do more of the things I actually want to do.

Social media is usually where people do this, but digging up old posts and reviewing them later is a pain. Plus, platforms like Twitter tank your posts’ visibility if they have links to other sites. A simple link blog solves all that for me.

Having a dynamic backend would make setting up a link blog trivial. But I’m too lazy to maintain one. Right now, this site is just a static Hugo build with some custom CSS flair. Adding a link blog without a dedicated backend is the tricky part.

If you don’t mind maintaining a dynamic site, Simon Willison has a great piece on running a link blog.

Here’s what has worked for me

I went with a dead simple approach that has worked for me for the past 5 months:

  • Detail view: Have a single markdown page dedicated to each year and add the links there. See 2025 feed detail view.
  • List view: Cluster the detail pages in a list view named feed.

Detail view

Each year gets its own detail page where I add links in reverse chronological order. The content has the following structure in markdown:

---
title: "2024"
layout: post
---

### December 26

#### [Reflecting on life – Armin Ronacher][32]

...

[32]: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/12/26/reflecting-on-life/

---

### December 24

#### [How I write HTTP services in Go after 13 years – Mat Ryer][31]

...

[31]: https://grafana.com/blog/2024/02/09/how-i-write-http-services/

---

Hugo renders the detail view like this:

Link blog detail view showing curated links with dates and commentary

List view

I use the Papermod theme for this site, and it automatically creates a list view from the yearly pages.

Link blog list view showing yearly feed pages in Hugo PaperMod theme

To avoid spamming people, the entries in the link blog are filtered out of the main RSS feed. Also, the client-side search functionality allows me to look for a particular link without having to maintain any extra infra.

This solution is simple and has been working well for me. I started it in August last year, and the 2024 feed page already has enough entries to make me feel good when I reviewed them at the end of the year.

~~~

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