Damian Cugley’s Weblog
In a discussion of quoting in weblogs I found a link to a note by Lore Sjöberg on one of the things mentioned by Tim Berners-Lee in his ancient Style Guide for online hypertext, namely that when writing hypertext you should make it make sense without the links.
This is important for me because my RSS feed uses plain text in the excerpts it includes—all the hyperlinks are stripped out. This is intentional: firstly, it removes the ambiguity over whether the text contains encoded HTML or not, which is one of the desperate flaws in the RSS conventions, and secondly because I want people to click through to my site to read the article.
I also have the same complaint as in Sjöberg’s article—too many weblog posts consist of a single link like This is funny or How sad is this?. For inspiration, see Mark Pilgrim’s auto-content page which (a) claims to be automatically generated and (b) is much more interesting to read. Your duty as an actual human being is to write something more interesting than a computer can.