From the past few months, I've been saving portfolios, articles, essays and blogs that I find worth reading on my Notion. Each resource has it's own page and I write my learnings, summary or short notes for the resource that I've read. So far I've collected more than 400 such resources. Further I've added tags, status and references for each link which helps me in filtering out and searching the resources easily. I call this huge resource of links as Reading List.

Later, I discovered Simon Willison's blog and realized that he's been doing this since 2003 which he initially called as "Blogmark". His approach of running a link blog is fascinating which inspired me to start my own.

He writes:

That's the purpose of my link blog: it's an ongoing log of things I've found—effectively a combination of public bookmarks and my own thoughts and commentary on why those things are interesting.

This makes perfect sense. The resources in my Reading List, are the ones I find most interesting and valuable, but being in my Notion workspace, they're only limited to me. Running a link blog will let me add my own notes, key take-aways and comments on the resources and share them publicly.

I realize my comments might not be as valuable as Simon's but I do want to share my piece on the internet.

I've found many link blogs, including Xuanwo's, Nelson's and Daring Fireball.

Honestly, I've found many resources by following the references of the articles, essay and portfolios that I've read or found interesting, one resource leading to another. I believe in the long run, this becomes a collection of high-value and rich knowledge resources that one can learn from.

I am not planning to port all my of previously stored links in my Reading List on my link blog at once. As I keep revisiting the resources after a period of time, I'm sure that eventually most of the links in my Reading List will make it on my link blog eventually.

As all the entities on my website (blogs, tils, projects, etc) are written in mdx, I've extended this support to the link blog, which gives me full flexibility of using quotations, images, essentially all of markdown plus ability to write my own custom components in React.

As a tribute to Aaron Swartz, the first link blog post is on my favourite essay from his Raw Nerve series, Believe you can change.