A linklog is a blogging format where the post titles link directly to an external site and the content of the post offers commentary on the linked piece. This is commonly referred to as a "linked list" like the The Daring Fireball Linked List which helped popularize the format.

To publish linked posts with Octopress simply add the url for the item you want to write about to the external-url variable in the yaml front matter of a blog post.

---
layout: post
title: "Someone on the Internet is Wrong"
date: 2012-02-05 17:18
comments: true
external-url: http://opinionguy.com/post/uninformed-rant-vs-straw-man/
---

When you generate your blog, the title link will point to the external url. Also, each post will show it's own permalink, and in the feed there will be a permalink at the end of linklog posts.

Customizing titles

In the _config.yml there are some configurations you can change if you like.

permalink_label: "∞"
permalink_label_feed: "∞ Permalink"
linklog_marker: "→"
linklog_marker_position: after
linklog_marker_position_feed: after
standard_post_marker:

The default settings were inspired by Marco Arment with one exception, in his RSS feed the linklog marker comes before the title to help readers better distinguish linked posts from normal posts. To use that style simply change linklog_marker_position_feed to before.

John Gruber's Daring Fireball takes a different approach than Marco. Rather than mark his linked posts, he adds ★ to the beginning of each of his standard posts. If you wanted to copy that style, you'd set it up like this.

permalink_label: "★"
permalink_label_feed: "★"
linklog_marker:
linklog_marker_position:
linklog_marker_position_feed:
standard_post_marker: "★ "

Styling

To help distinguish them from standard posts, linked posts have a smaller font size in addition to the linklog marker. When an article is a linked post it is marked with the html5 attribute data-linklog to give you a hook to customize styles if you like. If you wanted to set a different color for linked post titles you could add this css to your sass/custom/styles.scss.

.linklog .entry-title a {
  color: lime;
}

Styles for linklog markers and permalinks can also be customized.

.entry-title:hover .linklog-marker {
  color: $link-color-hover;
}
 
article a[rel=bookmark] {
  font-size: 1.2em;
}