Update: The Links page has been discontinued. Sorry.

I’ve been meaning to add a Links page to this site for quite some time, sharing some of my favorite sites with y’all.

Back in the day we all had pages like this, swapping links, oblivious of the coming onslaught of trackbacks and social media soapboxes. This was the way we did it, at least the ones of us who didn’t want to clutter our sites with those pesky buttons, 88×31 pixels or something. Or better yet, why not join a WebRing? Does anyone remember those?

These days most visitors come across sites through links, either from social media or from a search engine. The vast majority of visitors to a site is not type-ins anymore, and the visitors more often than not end up on a sub-page rather than your front page. That’s why I’ve taken to saying that every page needs to be a front page.

Still, I wanted to have a Links page so that I could link friends and stand-out sites. Most of you will probably not bother with it, but some of you no doubt will, and that’s enough for me. It is also a way for me to tip my hat to great content creators and/or publications. It’s not much, but it is something right?

But you know, I had a hard time creating the Links page. What’s the use of a Links page consisting of five links? Ten links? How many links do you need to make the Links page useful?

This intrigued me. I used to have a fairly long list of sites I enjoyed and visited on a regular basis, but I too have taken to follow recommendations from actual people rather than just doing the same rounds every day. So did I scrap the Links page? Well, obviously not, instead I figured that this was an interesting experiment. Will it grow beyond the 13 links it consists of now, or is this it? Mayhap I’ll be more attentive of the sites I come across during my day, and add the best to the Links page, thus building a nice little list for all to peruse.

Or perhaps I’ll quietly drop the Links page from the menu, realizing that there is no room for a page like this these days.

The web is certainly a different beast today. It is a beast where content is king, no matter what the search engine industry experts wants to sell. I still love it, as I did back then, when we swapped links and were young and naive.