Not long ago, a friend asked me why I didn’t have a page of links to external sites. Most other personal Web sites do. He’d stumbled across some interesting things that way.
My answer was that I dislike pages that are nothing more than lists of naked links. For example:
This link tells a visitor nothing other than that the author likes the site. Why? Is the content great? Is it useful? Could it be that its design knocks one’s socks off? The visitor won’t know. Neither will a visitor know if the site has problems, such as a long load time. Why not tell a visitor something useful about the site?
Jimland offers the lucky visitor the strange and dreamlike art and stories of the man-beast Jim Woodring. It is not for the faint of soul (or small of pipe). The work is unique; he has an unerring talent for tapping unimagined reservoirs of dream sap. Numinous wonder and prosaic terror can be yours in moments.
This is the technique used on my raves page.
Note the link in the previous paragraph. The link’s text is so tightly integrated into the sentence that the sentence would read just as well if there were no link. That’s the level of integration I aim for: text that flows smoothly, rather than being dashed to bits against the jagged rocks of "click here"s.
As for the previous page, the idea of a story wherein every single word was a separate link completely unrelated to anything has been in the back of my mind ever since I first started writing HTML five years ago. It was fun to finally do. Selecting the link destinations was harder than I had anticipated.
I’m not going to update the page. Part of its interest is in seeing how many links break over time.
Unbroken links:
404s, 6 did not respond, and 1 site had disappeared although the domain still existed. Among those still extant, 3 automatically forwarded to new URLs, 1 linked but did not forward to a new URL, 1 now required Javascript & cookies, and 1 was now protected by a password. Forwarding links count as broken; the criterion for success is finding the expected content at the given URL.)In case the moral was too oblique: it was a horror story.
Last updated 7 April 2008
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Fiction/ListOfLinks.html
All contents ©2000-2003 Mark L. Irons