phil ringnalda

Last month, when everybody (and quite possibly their cat) was linking to the now-pulled (oops, apparently you can’t get away with putting up scans of an entire book) Bunny Suicides site, I probably saw two dozen posts along the lines of

Bunny Suicides : kinda morbid, but funny.

before I finally saw JWalk saying

In the past few days, I’ve been seeing links to Bunny Suicides everywhere. I just assumed it was a cutesy Flash animation, so I never bothered to check it out.

But curiosity got the best of me, and I discovered that this site contains a bunch of single-panel cartoons that depict various methods a rabbit might use to commit suicide. Using a DVD player is just one way.

Which of course is exactly what I’d been thinking, but he was the first person to actually sell me his link, not just assume I would buy it no matter what.

Today, I’ve seen at least a half-dozen links to JavaScript Triggers, and halfway filed it away as something to maybe look at, since I’ve got some JS posts I need to get out of my head. Then, Joe at Gadgetopia actually sold the link to me, explaining who wrote it and what it was about (okay, he had me at PPK, but the what part, using your own attributes to drive script attachment out of the HTML, would also have grabbed my attention).

Low effort linklogs, with a link and three or four words, or super-low-effort del.icio.us links with no words, do serve a purpose, and are far better than my usual “save it for later (where later means never)” model, but every so often, could you haul out an old-school weblog post, where it’s a link and maybe two sentences, that don’t assume I’ll absolutely follow every single link you post?

And if you design weblog software, could you please keep in mind just how valuable it would be if your editing pages and your default post structure actually encourage that sort of valuable posting, rather than encouraging an alternation between nearly no detail and essays with vast, unexplored, Stygian depths?