In the early days of the web, when AltaVista was the most reliable search engine for many of us, it was much harder to find the sites you were interested in than it is now. Even when you’d found them there was no guarantee that you could find the same sites again easily, which is why many of us spent so much of our time using Bookmarks or Favourites to tag them. I still use Bookmarks in Firefox even though the History menu, AutoComplete, and Google (of course) all make it easier to find things that you have previously viewed.

When I first toyed with the idea of setting up a web page, in the early years of this century, my plan was to include a page full of the links I used regularly so that no matter which computer or browser I was using they would always be easily accessible. The page would serve as a portal to the pages I viewed most often.

Even though such a thing is no longer as relevant as it was 15 years ago I have finally set one up, the Links Menu at the top of this page. It is designed so that I can easily access a list of my most commonly visited pages. It serves as a Snapshot of the places I spend my time and, all being well, I’ll keep it more up-to-date than the various lists of Favourites and Bookmarks that have accumulated over the year.

It should save me a few nanoseconds while browsing on my phone. From anywhere on this Blog (and I do spend rather a lot of time here) I can access regularly used links with just my thumb, no need to type anything or visit the Favourites or History menus. Or maybe it will end up as just another cul-de-sac on the Internet, a dead end that nobody, including me, ever walks down.