Helpful Hyperlinks with JavaScript

There you are happily surfing a web site; you click a link and suddenly find yourself at another site being asked to download a file. What happened there? Annoying, isn’t it? There has to be a better way to indicate to your visitors where a link is going and to what type of file. So, to help solve this little annoyance, I’ve written a bit of JavaScript and CSS that adds pretty little icons after the links—depending on the file extension and location—to indicate to the user the type of document they’re about to load.

Somerville, Toby. SitePoint (2008). Articles>Web Design>Hypertext>JavaScript

BlockShopper v. Jones Day: The Right of Web Sites to Link

Cases that have addressed links and copyright dealt with the permissibility of "deep linking"—linking to a page other than the home page—which, of course, is indeed permitted. Ticketmaster famously lost a lawsuit against Tickets.com about just this. But that case was about copyright infringement; by making a trademark claim instead, Jones Day opened up another legal avenue.

Davis, Wendy. Slate (2009). Articles>Web Design>Legal>Hypertext

How Many Links Are Too Many Links?

To understand how much content effluvia we're subjected to, I wanted to see how many links are on the homepage of popular websites. For example, if I go to the homepage of the Huffington Post, I see 720 links, in one shot. Then click inside to a story and you've nearly doubled that number—it ads up pretty quickly. What about the tech blogs? BoingBoing Gadgets, 514. Gizmodo, 468. Engadget 432, all on one page. And on average, fewer than 1% of the links on news sites and blogs actually point to rich content, 99% are navigation and other article headlines. Aggregation site Techmeme has a whopping 1081 links.

Bilton, Nick. O'Reilly and Associates (2009). Articles>Web Design>Information Design>Hypertext

Linking to External Blog Posts from Our Documentation

A technical writer’s blog on Wordpress Linking to external blog posts from our documentation with 3 comments At work, we’ve just started a new set of documentation pages called “Tips of the Trade“. The project is still in the early stages. I thought other tech writers might be interested, so I’m blogging about it now. There will be a page for each of the products we document. The pages contain a set of links to useful blog posts written by people out there on the www. It’s a way of giving our readers more information and a way of involving external bloggers, developers and authors in our documentation.

Maddox, Sarah. ffeathers (2009). Articles>Documentation>Hypertext>Blogging