Internal links in the blog manager

Yesterday, I wrote at the end of the lengthy blog entry, I realised that I could easily display the 'this day in history' list in a suitable format for the blog manager program and forgot the idea of finding referenced blogs. I've been researching this a little and what I have found is not encouraging. Apart from the 'this day in history' links, there are two other kinds of links in these blog entries: those external to my blog (e.g. to YouTube or Wikipedia) and those that are internal (e.g. referencing a blog that I wrote a week ago). I am not interested in the external links; what I would like is that the internal links would bring up the referenced link when used in the context of my blog manager program.

Well, I don't think that's going to happen. To give an example, there's a blog dated 11/07/24 ('Pedalboard power supply problems') that contains an internal link to another blog written sometime in February

<a href="https://nbnewman.blogspot.com/2024/02/the-dublin-murder-squad.html" 
target="_blank>

Note that this reference doesn't give the actual date but rather the page name that Blogger assigns (I wonder what would happen if in the same month I wrote two blogs with the same title - presumably the second would be rejected). Of course, there is no blog number as Blogger apparently has no concept of a reference number.

This came through to my program as

<A href="https://www.blogger.com/#">

This is less than useless. I've discovered that all the internal links appear like this in the text that is saved by exporting the email that is sent automatically by Blogger to my account managed by a non-current version of Outlook (the current version completely mangles the text). Thus I am stymied even if I wanted to parse the HTML text that I receive in order to extract data leading to the blog stored in the blog manager.

I think that I will have to insert manually references of the type [1]  or [2], where these are stored in a database table, so I can bring up a list in the same way that the 'blog day in history' option is activated. Thus in the pedalboard case, [1] would reference blog #1725. I see that in one blog, I saved the link point with a sup tag ¹ then presumably I added the reference manually. So I'll see how this works out when I see the HTML text emitted by Outlook.

Internal links
[1] 1640

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This day in history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
278	26/08/2010	Updates (mainly The Swell Season)	DCI Banks, Peter Robinson, Swell Season
397	26/08/2011	Implicit vs explicit joins (SQL)/2	SQL
619	26/08/2013	Chaining functionality	ERP