Published on 06 January 2026 under the IndieWeb category.
I was recently asked by a fellow blogger how I would prefer to be credited in a blog post they were working on. This brought to mind an idea I have been thinking about for a while: how could I indicate the way I would prefer a post on my website to be cited? By having this information readily available, anyone who wants to link to my site would have the information they need to feel confident in their citation.
After thinking about this question for a while, I now have a “How to cite pages on my website” page – a living document – as well as an abbreviated version of this guidance at the bottom of a few categories on my blog.
Below,…
Published on 06 January 2026 under the IndieWeb category.
I was recently asked by a fellow blogger how I would prefer to be credited in a blog post they were working on. This brought to mind an idea I have been thinking about for a while: how could I indicate the way I would prefer a post on my website to be cited? By having this information readily available, anyone who wants to link to my site would have the information they need to feel confident in their citation.
After thinking about this question for a while, I now have a “How to cite pages on my website” page – a living document – as well as an abbreviated version of this guidance at the bottom of a few categories on my blog.
Below, I’ll talk a bit about how I now publish my citation preferences on my website, touching on both design and content considerations.
Building a citation preferences widget and page
Opening developer tools in Firefox, I started tinkering around with adding a section to the bottom of my blog posts that indicates my citation preferences. I wanted this section to be clear and concise in language, and apparent but unobtrusive in design. I decided to use the details element to create an accordion that includes a short statement on how to cite my blog post, as well as a text field that contains the URL for the web page the reader is viewing.
With a preliminary design ready, I started to roll out the widget to a few categories on my blog – presently, the IndieWeb, Coding, and one or two other categories. Here is what the widget, which appears at the bottom of my blog posts, looks like, when opened:
ALT
The end of a blog post with an open HTML details element that contains a sentence of text with citation guidelines, a link that says "Learn more", and a form field with the URL for the post.
The details element is closed by default, with the summary title “Reference this post”. The widget is closed by default is because the information is only relevant to those who are looking to link to a given blog post, not necessarily all readers.
This widget contains the essential information: my preferred name and my site name, my pronouns, and a link to the page. With that said, I wanted to add a bit more information. In pursuit of my goal of designing something unobtrusive in design and concise in language, I decided the additional information could be put on its own page. This information is now on my “How to cite pages on my website” page, published at /cite, which elaborates both on how to refer to my website and touches on how I think about linking to others’ sites in my own blog posts, too. The /cite page is intended to be a living document – one that may evolve over time.
I plan to roll out the widget on blog posts that are focused on technical topics for now. I don’t think the information is particularly useful at this point on my more poetic writing.
Of note, the details element that appears in the citation preferences widget on blog posts in relevant categories has an enclosed paragraph with the HTML ID cite. This means that I can link directly to the citation preferences widget on a given page, such as:
https://jamesg.blog/2026/01/06/citation-preferences#cite
The first enclosed paragraph in the details tag is given the ID cite so that the details will open by default when the link is opened. I may tinker with the design a little bit to highlight the opened details tag if it is directly linked to – maybe a border. This can be done, I think, with a combination of the :target, [open], and :has CSS selectors.
On writing this, one subtle consequence of not rolling out the citation widget on all pages means that #cite cannot be predictably added to the end of any blog post URL. I could make the citation widget invisible unless #cite is in the page URL for blog categories where I don’t need to show the widget? I’ll need to think about this more.
Conclusion
By more clearly stating the way I prefer my blog to be cited, I hope I can give people a bit more confidence on how to refer to my blog in their own blog posts. I would also be delighted if more people started talking about the idea of citation preferences!
Further reading
- The IndieWeb wiki /citation page has a collection of information about citing web pages, with links to many interesting adjacent topics.
- The IndieWeb wiki /display-guidelines page is related both to citation preferences and more generally how other sites should display content from another site.
Reference this post
Please reference this post with a link to this page. I prefer to be called James (he/him) or James’ Coffee Blog. Learn more
URL for this post: