A content page with some nice pictures of a different hummingbird family.

A content page with some nice pictures of a hummingbird family.

This page uses an alternate server, which can easily be set with a page variable.

The idea of a backlink is as old as the concept of a hyperlink, but they’re not as widely implemented as one-way links. A backlink is just a link that goes both ways – if you link to a page, that page knows that you’ve linked to it and can link back to you. In a way, hashtags are one of the most common forms of backlink – posts with hashtags are linked to a page that show you all the things linked to it. Following a hashtag means ending up at related content. Backlinks are like that, but just without the page in the middle. You link to a page, and the page knows you linked to it. This is really easy to do with Octothorpes.

Welcome to the demonstration site for the Octothorpes protocol. Here you can see standard octothorpes and backlinks in action, plus some suggestions for shorthand methods of making them.

Implementing Octothorpes is really easy. Here are some sites on other platforms that already have it.

This page sends octothorpes to two different servers.

This page has been linked to using a well-formed backlink, but it doesn’t endorse incoming links, so no link shows up.

If you don’t want to use javascript or display #s on the front end, you can use the pure-HTTP method.

Current revision: May 2024

Since octothorpes use basic markup, there are as many ways to create octothorpes as there are to make webpages. This site also contains some utilities to make writing Octothorpes easier, based on common patterns in use on many other platforms.

There are many synonyms for the hashtag. Here are some of our favorites.

Octothorpes are like super-tags for websites. So they are desingned to work seamlessly with any platform’s normal method of tagging content.

This page is using tags in the traditional way, even though the pages linked here use those tags as octothorpes.