The Talisman Link Database

One useful thing that probably everyone with a site dedicated to Talisman has, is a list of links to other sites. Unfortunatly this part is probably also the one that needs most of the regular "maintainance" - new sites come and old sites vanish, pages are moved from one URL to another, names and descriptions change and more of the like.

Keeping the link monster up to date is a tiresome and sometimes even frustrating work - at least, that is, if you have to do it alone.

Being rather lazy myself ;-) I thought about some solution to that problem and came up with the idea of a central link database - The Talisman Link Database, the thing you are reading about at the moment.

What is it?

The Link Database stores all interesting/required data for the various Talisman sites around, like the URL, the name of the site, a short description, features, a small thumbnail screenshot (nice idea Jon!), the logo - whatever. Link lists now can be easily created dynamically from this database.

Those that have some knowledge in (web)programming can query the database themselves and design their linkpages any way they like, using the data from the (hopefully :-) complete and up-to-date central collection.

Those that are not able (or don't want to) do this on their own can include a ready-made, but customizable link page into their sites; being able to set the background image, the fonts and colors and probably more things you can adjust the "common" page to the look and feel of your site.

This way of handling the "link problem" has a number of advantages:

• As everybody is able to add, change and correct data the list will probably be much more correct and up-to-date with still much less work for every single maintainer than if everybody kept his or her own list.
• If you change the name, the URL or other relevant things of your site, instead of writing tons of mails to everybody around (or worse, simply letting nobody know and have them keep the wrong link :-) you just do a quick update to the database and in the very same moment everybody else's list is already correct with not a bit of additional work for either them or you!
• Nice things could (still in planning stage :-) be done: What about an automatic check, when the site was last updated? (with everybody having the opportunity to include this info in his or her linklist of course!) It's possible! Automatically mark sites as "New!" or "Updated!"? It's possible!