A linklog is a blogging format where the post titles link directly to an external site and the content of the post offers commentary on the linked piece. This is commonly referred to as a "linked list" like the [The Daring Fireball Linked List](http://daringfireball.net/linked/) which helped popularize the format.
To publish linked posts with Octopress simply add the url for the item you want to write about to the `external-url` variable in the yaml front matter of a blog post.
When you generate your blog, the title link will point to the external url. Also, each post will show it's own permalink, and in the feed there will be a permalink at the end of linklog posts.
The default settings were inspired by [Marco Arment](http://marco.org) with one exception, in his RSS feed the linklog marker comes before the title to help readers better distinguish linked posts from normal posts. To use that style simply change `linklog_marker_position_feed` to `before`.
John Gruber's [Daring Fireball](http://daringfireball.net) takes a different approach than Marco. Rather than mark his linked posts, he adds ★ to the beginning of each of his standard posts. If you wanted to copy that style, you'd set it up like this.
To help distinguish them from standard posts, linked posts have a smaller font size in addition to the linklog marker. When an article is a linked post it is marked with the html5 attribute `data-linklog` to give you a hook to customize styles if you like. If you wanted to set a different color for linked post titles you could add this css to your `sass/custom/styles.scss`.