On this site, Tags are octothorpes

The easiest way to octothorpe a page is to turn that page’s existing metadata into octothorpes. That’s what’s happening here – this site is built so that any tag added to a page turns into an octothorpe for the same term. The card in the left margin outputs all the tags on this page as octothorpes. So, as an author, I don’t have to take any extra steps. I just tag my page, and it will become an octothorpe. Under demo you can see that the list of octothorped pages includes not just pages on this site but pages on other sites. Under tags you’ll only see this page, because it’s the only one that uses that as an octothorpe.

For comparision, here’s the list of all the pages on this site with the normal tag of “tags”.

If you click through, you’ll see that there’s a page on that list that’s not in the list of octothorped pages. That’s just to underscore how we can closely control how this works. Since the parser is part of the structure of this site, not the ocothorpe protocol, we can decide whether or not to include it on different pages. So the page in the list of tagged pages simply doesn’t parse octothorpes.

Likewise, we can send ocothorpes to different servers from the same site.

Like many static site generators, all the content is written in markdown. This site parses common character patterns and creates octothorpes or backlinks accordingly.