Our minds on media.

How and when I cite things and what those citations accomplish has been an interesting task here at Banapana, since I am frequently referring to many of the same texts and articles in multiple posts. My early attempts used footnotes in the articles but that didn’t really help too much since I still had to copy and paste from one entry to another and had to just remember where the last place I’d used the reference was. I also tried using Amazon associate links which was useful in some ways, but there was still no way to really automate the process. But I think that now I’ve hit on a really ideal way to create citations on blogs.

This post is a test of the new citation tool I’m attempting to set up using SH-autolink, a fantastic WordPress plugin from ROCKSCHTAR.DE. Vielen Dank Rockschtar! What the autolink tool allows me to do is create an automatically generated link to any post. So I can can create posts that are citations and then automatically link to that post by just typing the short form of the citation into the post, such as: (Haugeland 1997). That link was automatically generated. The citation information, any critical excerpts from the text, and links to the text if available are all there in the citation post. What’s more, using this process allows the site to keep a running bibliography by just clicking on the “References” category. Head to the References archives page and and you can see the bibliography for the entire site! It short and sweet at the moment, but I’m sure that will change over time. Hopefully, too, I will be able to alphabetize this particular category page as well. I also think that it might be useful to set up a glossary of terms this way as well!