Missing links

Here's something I don't like, and, more, I don't think works well: writing your blog posts in such a way that people have to hit a link (that you've generally buried in the post itself) to figure out what the fuck you're talking about. A lot of the more popular poli-blogs do this sort of thing all the time -- "Rudy Guilians steps on his johnson again... and this time, it's personal." And if you want to find out what the christ they're actually talking about, you have to hit those links.

First, it's annoying to me to have to travel to some entirely different web page so I can understand a crucial reference, without which comprehension, the rest of the blog post makes little or no sense.

Second, a great many times, whatever link you may have posted will stop working at some point after you originally posted it. Which is well beyond annoying, if you've written the original post under the presumption that people will hit your stupid links and go read the original source material you're referring to, because now they can't, so they will find it impossible to understand what you're actually blithering in regard to.

So here's what I say -- linking to original source material is fine, but, please, for the love of Bast, don't rely on the link alone. Take a second to block, copy, and paste the relevant sections of the source text into your own blog post, so even if your link doesn't work, your readers can still figure out what in the name of sweet undulating Cthulhu you're referring to.

Okay?