Sharing links

Here is a little post to show what is my workflow for sharing links, hoping it could inspire you.

For many years I used to share links solely on Twitter and sometimes with some URL shorteners. This workflow relies on the durability of several third-party tools: Twitter, the URL shortener and the shared link itself.

It gets complicated when the shared link or the URL shortener disapears, breaking some tweets and, maybe, frustrating some people.

The last year, in a phase when I was rethinking of my use of online tools (which will be the subject of a later post), I decided to change my way of keeping track and sharing links. I installed Shaarli, a tool written in PHP which uses a flat database and started to save links into it.

As I also wanted to keep track of the source of the saved link I added a known plugin to my installation: shaarli-plugin-via which lets you add an additional link to a saved link as the original source.

As I save a number of links originated from tweets, I wanted to add an icon to show when the original link was actually a tweet. I forked the plugin, adding the support of a twitter icon, which is available here: Kdecherf/shaarli-plugin-via.

Having this tool lets me archive links and quickly search on it without the fear of seeing the service disapear (Hello, Delicious?).

Though I must admit that almost nobody will visit my personal database of links I still need to keep posting them on Twitter ('cause it's important to share the knowledge). I thought it would be great to narrow the required steps for sharing content by integrating it directly into Shaarli. Thus I published another plugin: Kdecherf/shaarli-plugin-buffer. This one relies on Buffer¹, a third-party tool for posting content on several social networks.

The plugin will basically handle the post of saved links to Twitter using several sharing policies like: post using schedule, post using schedule but on top of the current queue, post now, and so on. Furthermore the plugin interacts with the plugin via to check if the saved links comes originally from a tweet, then it will post this tweet as a retweet instead of making a tweet on its own.

There's another tiny but still useful plugin on Shaarli: archiveorg, which adds a link to archive.org in case the saved link disapears.

Retweets versus new tweets

As I value the original poster more than some analytics, I consider that retweeting original tweets is more meaningful than posting new tweets. And it does not matter if the original tweet disappears as I have a copy of the link on my side now.

If you are interested to see what am I sharing, you can come here: https://links.kdecherf.com

Enjoy!

Since the installation of Shaarli I saved and shared more than 900 links, and counting.