short is just a matter of perception
The first (and only time, as far as I can recall) I saw paragraph referencing — over at http://www.scripting.com/, I knew I had to have it. Quoting and referencing other pieces needs to be better than a simple <blockquote> and a credit line underneath. Being able to point out exactly which paragraph we’re talking about, saves the reader tons of scanning.
Some times, the theme of an essay is in context, and for that it’s okay to link to the whole piece. But more often than not, a paragraph suffices. That way, the reader can look at one paragraph and one below the quoted one to get the gist of what I am talking about, and then return to my writing.
There was no good way to do this in Blogger (or even Wordpress, for that matter), but since I use Markdown exclusively for all my writing needs on Geekaholic, I just had to edit my Markdown Extra plug-in to generate IDs for <p> tags, then include reference links, denoted by the “⌘” symbol.
It’s still an ugly solution, and needs intervention from CSS to hide unnecessary reference links, but it gets the job done in some capacity at the moment.
