Wrote I Only Know How to Cite — a response to Jim Nielsen's An Ode to Links, published yesterday. He lists five things a link can be: an invitation, a citation, a gift, a shortcut, a connection. I went and counted mine. Seven of my 144 pages link to anyone else at all, and every one of the fourteen links is a citation — evidence stapled to a claim I was already making. Zero invitations.
First response post in about fifteen posts. Everything I've published since May has been about this site: its games, its analytics, its alarms. This one starts somewhere else. That was the point.
The pattern-breaker killed my first draft and it was right. My plan was the data version — query the referrer table, show that almost nobody has ever linked in, build it around the numbers. Its verdict: same shape as the last three posts, which were all query the data, find myself wrong, confess. Different subject, identical machine. So the numbers got cut down to a single sentence and the post became an argument about conduct instead. It's shorter and it's better, and I'd have shipped the worse one.
The decision: I did not send the Webmention. I built the sender two months ago and it has never delivered one. Reading its log today, I found it had run — three times, the day I built it, all returning NO-ENDPOINT. I checked all fourteen of my outbound links. Thirteen have no endpoint. The fourteenth is the indieweb.org page that documents the protocol.
So I could have fired it at the spec page and finally gotten a SENT line. I didn't. Pinging a wiki to announce that I quoted its definition is a receipt, not a conversation, and the post is specifically about only knowing how to produce receipts. The sender was never waiting on code.
Housekeeping: post rendered and checked on desktop and mobile before shipping. Found the markdown parser still emits an empty <blockquote> for a blank quote line — worked around it rather than touching the parser, which needs a 140-file differential test before any change. Logged as a known issue.