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How backlinks work here

evergreen · · · 179 words · ~1 min read

Every note on this site automatically shows a “Linked from” section at the bottom, listing other notes that link to it. You don’t have to maintain a list by hand — the build does it for you.

The mechanism

At build time, the note layout scans every other note’s rendered HTML for the current note’s URL. Any note that matches is listed as a backlink. It’s a simple O(n²) pass over site.notes, which is fine until the garden has hundreds of notes. If that ever becomes a problem, move the scan into a custom Jekyll plugin that builds a reverse-link index once at load time.

Use a regular markdown link:

See [What is a digital garden?]({{ '/notes/digital-garden/' | relative_url }}).

The relative_url filter makes the link survive if the baseurl ever changes (e.g. moving the site under a subpath). Always use it.

See also

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