Many organisations and indeed individuals need to publish a list of links on their web site.

A common solution is to use a list or a table to create a static page.

If you have access to the resources and a bit of knowhow with PHP and HTML, you can use a database to hold the links and offer your users a much richer experience. This can be achieved using a type of server side program called a link indexer. I have has some experience of two systems and can say that I will never  choose to write a static page again.

My first atempt running a "link farm" or baby yahoo as I like to call them was carried out using a program called SSlinks. This free program offers the maintainer and user a fairly standard set of services

• links are contained in a database
  
• users can submit links but the owner of the farm has final say over whether these links from guests will be shown
  
• users can sort links and search for links
  
• users can comment on links and rate them
  
• recent links  can be listed on a spearate page and are tagged with the word "new" for a time you determine
  
• the owner can edit links

Recently, I have been trying out a new indexer called WSNlinks. http://www.bigwebmaster.com/1430.html 

This move was prompted by the fact that SSlinks is no longer supported and also it has no easy way to move links.

WSN has current support and offers many more features than SSlinks, including

• having the ability for the owner to delegate selected responsibilities to other registered users
  
• extensive templating features to make any given page display the information that you want to be there eg I can imagine not wanting the rating feature on some site so I can cause it to not be displyed if I wish
  
• oneclick back and restore of the database
  
• linking to related categories
  
• multilingual capabilities
  
• file attachments to submissions eg thumbnails of a site you are linking to
  
• integration with a selection of discussion forums
  
• support via an online forum

WSNlinsk comes in two flavours - a slightly older version which is free and the latest version which costs USD20.

It's early days for me with WSNlinks but it looks like a winner. It can be explored at http://www.webmastersite.net.