Hyperlinks

Continuing on from yesterday’s theme of publishers harming themselves through their behaviour today I want to comment on the fad of adding hyperlinks to comments rather than directly into a post. The idea is that you can use the image you want, and by clicking to see comments facebooks counts this as engagement.

It’s worth mentioning that if I click on a hyperlink facebook knows, and the website knows, so nothing is gained by forcing us to jump through the “comments” hoop. This is especially true since once three or four views have been expressed in a comment the rest is noise.

Yesterday I noticed that the blog posts I write in Hugo via Vim are uglified on Mastodon and Calckey. By uglified I mean that the neat and tidy key words that I use as tags are converted into hashtags on Mastodon and Calckey and this makes me both sad and angry. It makes me sad because hashtags are a way of spamming conversations, and of allowing people who are not invested to participate in conversations.

Today I walked a 15-kilometre loop because I saw people walking two abreast and decided to retrace my steps a short distance before trying a new bifurcation. By the end of this walk, my legs were starting to get tired. I walked non stop for over two hours before a quick stop at a petrol station to get some drinks before heading home.

Before going on my walk I finished the CSS course on Linkedin Learning before starting another one on HTML. It’s not that I need to learn about HTML so much as I have a desire to complement what I already know.