dive into mark

Zeldman is right: it’s not about popularity, it’s about conversation. My further reading lists were always supposed to be about tracking conversations, but somewhere along the line I think this site got a little too popular itself, and the lists turned into some sort of weird popularity contest based on incoming traffic. I admit that I have, at times, played up this angle by asking people to link to specific posts. Mea culpa.

Anyway, my further reading lists now include excerpts from the referring page. The visitor counts are still around, but they’re now stuffed in the title attribute of the links (hover your cursor over the links to see them). I hope that, if anyone are going to do any judging around here, they’ll judge based on people’s words and not on their relative traffic. Words, words, they’re all we have to go on.

Also, you can now subscribe to the Further Reading RSS feed, which includes titles, links, and excerpts of all referrers that link to anything I’ve posted in the past few days. And I can get back to doing what I always and only ever wanted to do: keeping track of this glorious, ongoing, worldwide conversation… or at least the infinitesimal fraction of it that points my way.

linkbackparser.py. GPL-licensed. Tested on Python 2.2.

Update: Now with permalinks in many cases, and semi-permalinks (anchors on the home page) in most other cases.

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