Tracing Sequences and Finding Anchors

I’ve added two new research tools to my site. They act as a mirror to help me find emergent thinking and encourage exploration of the relationships between my years of reading and writing. They make the links legible and help me strengthen the centers (instead of weeding the edges).

Sequences

Last week I had an idea while gardening the yard:

What if I could trace a path, backlink to backlink, through posts on my site? What little trains of thought would it show me? Could it show me veins of circulation?

I built a Jekyll plugin for my site last year to calculate each post’s backlinks (other places on the site that link to it). I’ve always found it useful to see what else references something - lends it weight. In a personal knowledge system or digital garden, links reflect usage more than potential.

I realized that I could, in that same plugin, walk those backlinks back and build a set of sequences for the site. So now, that’s a new tool: Sequences. For now, the minimum sequence length is 3 posts (two is just a link). I use the sequences to explore a thought in depth, following a curated path through related posts, notes, and comments. I like to think of each new sequence as a happy little discovery of reasoning.

As of writing, the longest sequences are 6 posts long.

Anchors

A couple days later, after browsing these sequences, I started to see the same few posts pop up in several of them.

I wonder which posts are the most backlinked? Which ones are carrying the most weight for the rest of the site? What are the emerging centers?

So I added that to the Jekyll plugin and site build too: summing up the count of backlinks to each post and selecting the top most-linked ones into Anchors. For now, I’m just considering the top 5% of posts with the most backlinks: I don’t need to game this system. These posts act as central hubs that my thinking and notes naturally gravitate toward and references. Or, maybe, hopefully, new anchors are founded.

I think of them as my own little campfires in the garden.

As of writing, the heaviest anchors hold down 6 backlinks.

The Plugin

This Jekyll plugin has become more and more important to the utility of this site: building backlinks, sequences, anchors. Should I open-source it? Would you use it? Let me know.