[citation needed]
When I link to other sites, especially in big link roundup posts like yesterday’s, I try to cite the author of the post by name. Not just by name, but with a link. This is the Web, after all. Here’s a not-at-all-random example, drawn from yesterday’s post, of how I typically do this:
Sometimes—especially when I’m linking to a personal blog like James’—it’s super easy to find a link to the author’s website from the post I’m linking to. But many multi-author sites or larger organizations make this surprisingly hard. Here are some examples, also drawn from yesterday’s post:
Naming Conventions for Digital Resources, by Rebecca Guenther.
This page doesn’t link to the author, it just mentions her email address. Also, it was written 20 years ago. The author retired at some point between then and now, so I’m guessing the email address doesn’t work anymore. I ended up using a search engine to find a suitable link for her.
Next, consider the Internet Archive’s blog:
This blog post says who wrote it, and the author’s name is a link, so we’re getting somewhere. The link is to an “author page” on the blog itself, that lists all of the posts on this blog that this person wrote. Sometimes this is the best I can do, and I link to such a page. But lots of journalists contribute to multiple publications, so I generally prefer to link to their own site if possible. The Internet Archive’s author pages don’t link to the author’s website, though, so I had to resort to Google in this case too.
Japanese Pro Soccer Player Comes Out as Trans, Says He Retired to Fulfill Dream of Transition, by James Factora.
This article on Them also links to a page listing the author’s contributions to Them, but this time, that page links to some of the author’s social social media accounts. But it doesn’t link to the author’s own website! Fortunately, the author links to his website from his social media profiles, so that’s how I found the right link to use.
This last pattern is really common these days. Lots of publications link to their contributor’s social media, but not to their websites. If you want to find their website, you first have to visit their social media profile(s). And with so many journalists still using the deepfake porn site formerly known as Twitter, I find this bounce through a third party service problematic as well as unnecessarily indirect.