Blog Neighbors

The blogs that cited Ribbonfarm during the blog era (2007–2017). Inbound pingbacks — automated link notifications between WordPress blogs — recorded which posts were being read and linked across the blogosphere. This is a partial map of Ribbonfarm's reading community as it existed before social media replaced the blogosphere. See the data quality notes below before drawing conclusions.

Activity Timeline

Top 35 neighbor domains by ping count. Each cell = pings in that year from that blog. ■ alive   ■ redirected   ■ parked   ■ dead

All Neighbors

Domains with 2+ inbound pings. 543 single-ping domains not shown. Quora (115 pings) treated separately — not a blog.

Data Quality Notes

Pingbacks were an automated notification mechanism: when a blog post linked to a Ribbonfarm article, WordPress would ping Ribbonfarm's server to record the link. This data covers 2007–2017. The record ends there not because Ribbonfarm stopped being cited, but because WordPress disabled automatic outgoing pingbacks around 2016 and social media replaced blogroll-style linking. For post-2015 reach, see the Most Influential sort (HN and Reddit data).

Significant limitations to keep in mind:

• Pingbacks only capture a fraction of actual citations. Many blogs linked to Ribbonfarm without sending a pingback — either because they ran non-WordPress platforms, had pingbacks disabled, or linked without triggering the notification. Direct link mentions across the web are not captured here at all.
• Domain status is unreliable as a continuity signal. A domain marked "alive" means it returned a valid HTTP response at time of check — not that the original blog is still there. Domains are routinely sold and repurposed; a site active in 2010 may now host completely unrelated content under the same address.
• 20 trackbacks are included alongside 1,195 pingbacks. Trackbacks were an older, more spam-prone mechanism; they are likely less reliable as signals of genuine citation.
• 464 of 1,215 pings lack a parseable date in their source URL, so their year is unknown and they are excluded from the timeline.

This page is preserved as a historical artifact of the WordPress-era blogosphere rather than a comprehensive citation record. It is linked from the For Researchers page for those interested in blogosphere history.