What I’m Calling Linkverts.
I also considered unvertisements.
Many moons ago, I tried putting ads on here, found Google mostly served non-profit filler ads, decided it wasn’t worth the trouble, and never looked back. But I’m not opposed to the idea of advertising: the problem is most ads are bad. It’s like salad, only different. Most ads are for products you don’t like, implemented in a format that’s annoying, making you wonder why you were bothering to try to read whatever the article was.
I like some stuff in this world-wide web of ours, but I’m not always going to write a post about each thing, so I decided to add ads—ahem, linkverts—to my posts. One per post, randomly chosen from the full list, with a link to Linkverts, which both explains them (and links back to this post), while also listing all the currently-active linkverts.
Implementation details
I could have used the WordPress Links feature, but I opted not to as there is extra data I wanted to include and didn’t feel like futzing with a database since there won’t be tens of thousands or anything. So I just have a list. I worked on that a bit, but then I asked myself: what about search engines?
What about search engines? Well, I didn’t want a search engine to turn up the content from the linkvert when someone searched, since the linkverts would change from load to load. I found out Google (Google Search Central: “Using the data-nosnippet HTML attribute”) and Bing (“Bing Introduces Support for the data-nosnippet HTML Attribute” from 15 October 2025) and hopefully other crawlers implement a data-nosnippet attribute. Marking parts of a page with that attribute signals not to use that content as a snippet for search listings. The linkverts are mixed with content, but they shouldn’t be confused with the content. (I would prefer that the attribute said what I just did: data-this-ain’t-content, but alas the search engines don’t know that one.)
I briefly tried implementing the ads themselves as SVG, before deciding that HTML is better. (SVGs can’t auto-size text, so I quickly gave up on them.) After that, I quickly settled on wanting three things: a title, a type, and a description, for each item.
I also added some colors, to match sites that have notable colorschemes and add a little more fun to the enterprise. My overall design goal was for them to read for what they are: kind-of ads, but not ads. I hope they meet that, because I don’t want anyone thinking anyone paid for them, but I also don’t want them to be seen as part of the overall page content.
I like the idea of spreading the news for cool things online, but it has to be for things I feel isn’t too commercial and yet might have broad enough appeal. That’s a big part of why internet radio became an easy and dominant type of linkvert. We’ll see if I leave them up for the long-term, change them, or add to their ranks over time.
I thought about linking some blogs, and I still might, but for now I haven’t. I’m conflicted on what I consider a quality blog. Many I follow only update a couple times a year, whereas a few update more than weekly. I may start keeping a list of quality posts and try to linkvert just those rather than frontpages? Who knows.
As I think on it, maybe I’ll come up with a bunch of other things to linkvert, or maybe not. Unlike advertisements, where you select which ones based on who’s paying, I have to rely on my own knowledge and taste for the linkverts. Some of the linkverts may suffer linkrot over time, which is its own problem. But that’s the nature of information ecosystems: some new things come, some last, some don’t.