Linkgraphs Are Fun

As far as I am aware, link graphs were pioneered by Artemis calm web reader, you can read about their take on it as Artemis Link Graph. In their own words:

Artemis Link Graph is a web extension that tells you when the page you are viewing has been linked to in a post from a website you follow on Artemis.

You can use this extension to discove]r what websites you enjoy are saying about different web pages.

— Source: Artemis Link Graph | Artemis

It is a very neat feature. It works by surfacing posts from sites you follow that mention the page you're current reading. In an age of algorithimic timelines trying to herd you into content that improve their metrics and the profit for their shareholders, having such organic connections is a blessing.

I mentioned in The Web Should Be A Conversation that I want to go back to a human-centric web instead of this agentic bullshit we've been forced into. Linkgraphs seem a wonderful tool in that direction cause they provide immediate, actionable, interesting connections between what interests you and those you subscribed to.

Artemis is a wonderful calm web reader. If you're in the mood to try a different web reading / blog reading experience, I believe you should give it a try.

I find it quite cute that two calm web readers with cat mascots — Artemis and BlogCat — are both developed in Scotland, must be something in the water.

Inspired by Artemis, I decided to implement the same feature in BlogCat. Still, credit is due and they did it first.

In BlogCat, the linkgraph surfaces as a page action. If you're viewing a page that has been linked in a post from a site you follow you'll see the little cat popup.

If you click the popup, you'll see the list of posts that linked to the page you're viewing.

I would love to see other blogging clients (feed readers? Can we settle on a name for these type of apps?) implementing such feature.

How it is implemented in BlogCat

I followed Artemis very close but didn't use any of their code cause the underlying implementation of data storage and general workflow is very different between both clients.

Artemis is a SaaS that exposes the linkgraph as a JSON that is then read by their extension and saved to session storage.

BlogCat is a WebExtension, a full web reader inside Firefox. When you open the reader view, BlogCat fetches the feeds it needs to fetch and then calculates the linkgraph by extracting all the links from all the posts and saving them to session storage. The linkgraph is only rebuilt when you open the reader view (BlogCat doesn't do background fetching of feeds).