this belongs to this story, but it's too long for the frontpage and to wide for a comment, so i put it here :-)

i implemented the feature mentioned there in my local antville installation by modifying link_macro(param) in hopobject/macros.js to use a new function linkTitle(url) that i put into hopobject/objectFunctions for the sake of simplicity. i guess this is the wrong place to do this, because it only works with <% site.link %>, but not with <% link %>. anyway, the code itself works fine, so here it is:

link_macro as it was before:

function link_macro(param) {
  if (param.checkdeny == "true") {
    if (this.isDenied(session.user))
      return("");
  }
  var content = param.text ? param.text : param.to;
  param = this.createLinkParam(param);
  openMarkupElement("a", param);
  res.write(content);
  closeMarkupElement("a");
}

and the new version:

function link_macro(param) {
  if (param.checkdeny == "true") {
    if (this.isDenied(session.user))
      return("");
  }
  var content = param.to;
  if (param.text) {
    content = param.text;
  } else if (param.autoTitle != "off") {
    var linkTitle = this.linkTitle(param.to);
    if (linkTitle) {
      content = linkTitle;
    }
  }
  param = this.createLinkParam(param);
  openMarkupElement("a", param);
  res.write(content);
  closeMarkupElement("a");
}

and here's linkTitle:

/**
 * return title of linked object or null if it has no
 * title.
 * so far, only titles of stories are extracted, but this
 * could be extended to also return titles of topic-frontpages,
 * external html pages (those titles would have to be
 * cached) etc.
 */
function linkTitle(url) {
   if (!url) {
      return null;
   }
   var iFirstSlash = url.indexOf("/");
   if (url.substring(0, iFirstSlash) != "stories") {
      return null;
   }
   var rest = url.substring(iFirstSlash + 1, url.length);
   var storyNum = parseInt(rest);
   if (isNaN(storyNum)) {
      return null;
   }
   var story = path.site.stories.get(String(storyNum));
   return story.getContentPart("title");
}

hope this helps. i'd love to see that in antville!