Grayside.Org

Freelinking 1.x was previously announced as feature-frozen, and the next thing to unsupported. Looking at the long development cycle for Freelinking 3 reaching stability, the issue queue was dusted off.

Freelinking 1.9 will fix a number of bugs in 1.8, and smooth out the transition to FL3. Please go on over to the Freelinking homepage and download the dev version to try it out.

Freelinking 1.9 will be released this week.

Since I have recently become a co-maintainer on Freelinking, and am now leading Freelinking 3 onward to the next Alpha release, I felt a need to philosophize about Freelinking and where it is going.

One of the biggest differences between traditional writing and composing for the web is the ability to easily interconnect information. Inline references for immediate “further reading” are really powerful, really easy for readers, and really annoying for writers. Be it composing HTML or clicking buttons, creating links interrupts the flow of ideas. Suddenly we have a trade-off between a bad writer experience and a limited reader experience.

Enter Freelinking, the Drupal module that addresses the simple, wiki-like approach to creating links, providing the kind of shorthand notation that minimizes the impact on writers.

I use this extensively in my personal issues queue, and it helps. On the inspiration of an issue to colorize the issues in the casetracker views, I’ve fast-tracked this project to provide thoroughly stylizable links to casetracker cases.