Update: I changed the way they work. I am now happy with the way they look.

I used to have a feature on Scripting News that I called paragraph-level permalinks, but other people called them WinerLinks, because I was apparently the first to have them. Whatever you call them, they're nice to have. And I heard from a few people that they missed them, so I put the feature on my to-do list.

Notice that this post has them. Over in the right margin, you should see little purple hashes. If you click on one, it'll open the page scrolled to that paragraph.

They're useful if you want to comment elsewhere on a specific part of a post. Since I want to encourage people to do that, I like the idea of these links. What I don't like is how distracting they are. I like the feature, but I'd like to have it be less visible.

For that I ask you, Ms or Mr Designer, to give it a try. Mock up a page with these links and try to come up with something that looks better.

PS: To see how distracting they can be, look at a longer post as an example.

Update #2: I tweaked the implementation to use the first characters of the first five words in the paragraph to form the permalink. This allows you to reorder the paragraphs without breaking links. However, if you change any of the first five words, the links break too. Trade-offs, always. This idea was stolen from the NYT implementation of paragraph-level permalinks.