Links, Links, Links

I was running my Links page through the W3C's Link Checker (something anyone who has external links on their site should do regularly), when I got to thinking - does anyone really care? Used to be that a "Links" page was kind of a big deal, but that was before massive portal sites and search engines like Google (and I'm not going to take the time to put a link into that - if you don't know how to get to Google by now...). Linking to personal web sites is sketchy because they often disappear before long (not always, though the links I have to personal sites continue to decrease due to sites going away), and is there a point to linking to major or well-known companies like Reaper Miniatures? You don't need to "find" them through me - and do you really care that I think they're a cool enough company to link to?

Perhaps those pages are useful, and I'm simply approaching the matter from someone who's been using the Web for years and is rather computer-savvy - a common failing among people like me.

Hard to say! A Links page is probably better used to alert people to things they might not normally run across, particularly in forums or e-mail lists, which I assume is how most people find out about neat new stuff. I'm debating whether to even continue to have a separate page for that. When other people link to me, I feel it's only appropriate that I return the favor. But if not for that, I'm not sure what the utility of the page is...though maybe I just need to approach it differently.

Along the same lines, I removed the "awards" part of the Links page, since there are no valid links there anymore. The originated pages have long since disappeared. And while I appreciate the folks that gave me those awards originally, I don't know that anyone actually cares about whether a site received an award or not. If you have content that interests them, they'll bookmark your site. If you don't, it wouldn't matter who gave you your awards. And honestly, I don't know if anyone's giving out awards anymore anyway. That seemed to be a big thing early on in the Web, but nowadays it's about as meaningful as the Grammys :) Or the Origins Awards (does anyone care about those other than a handful of game writers? I've never bought anything on the basis of whether it won an award or not - see my comment about "content" above).