The Why of Linking to a Resource Multiple Times

In Completing Org Links, the author mentioned the following: “I try never to link to something more than once in a single post.”

And I agree!

In a single blog post, I like all of my article’s A-tags to have unique href attributes. (Sidenote: See <a>: The Anchor element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language) And I also like to use semantic Hypertext Markup Language 📖 , such as the CITE-tag (Sidenote: See <cite>: The Citation element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language) or the ABBR-tag. (Sidenote: See <abbr>: The Abbreviation element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language)

In my Org-Mode writing, I frequently link to existing Denote documents. Some of those documents do not have a public Uniform Resource Locator (URL 📖) and others do. During the export from Org-Mode to Hugo, via Ox-Hugo, linked documents that have public URLs will be written up as Hugo shortcodes. And linked documents without public URLs will be rendered as plain text.

The shortcode logic (Sidenote: See glossary.html shortcode for implementation details.) ensures that each page does not have duplicate A-tags. And in the case of abbreviations, the short code ensures that the first time I render the abbreviation, it renders as: Full Term (Abbreviation) then the next time as Abbreviation; always using the correct ABBR tag and corresponding title attribute.

I also have date links (Sidenote: Here I add “date” to the org-link-set-parameters) , which export as TIME-tags. (Sidenote: See <time>: The (Date) Time element - HTML: HyperText Markup Language) And someday, I might get around to writing a function to find the nodes that reference a date’s same year, year/month, and year/month/day.

Another advantage of multiple links in my Org-Mode is that when I shuffle my notes to different files, the backlink utility of Denote and Org-Roam will pick up these new documents

All of this means that my Org-Mode document is littered with links, but on export the resulting to my blog, things become tidier.

So yes, don’t repeat links in blog posts; that’s just a lot of clutter. But for Personal Knowledge Management (PKM 📖) , spamming the links helps me ensure that I’m able to find when and where I mention things.

Which is another reason I have an extensive Glossary of Terms for Take on Rules. All in service of helping me find things.