I need to sort links by date added so that existing link partners pretty much stay on the same page they have always been on.

I read this thread:

tool-to-sort-order-of-links-t806.html?hilit=sort%20order

And then read about the sortBy variable in the manual:

http://www.link-assistant.com/tutorial/ ... ables.html

However, I'm not sure exactly the code in the default template that I need to tweak.

Here is the default partner code in the template:



In the manual, it says to do something like this:



Should I just delete all the default partner code and plug in the code above?

Thanks

Unfortunately the current version of LinkAssistant does not allow sorting by date. The tutorial is for the older 2x version, sorry for the inconvenience.

If the tutorial is for a previous version, what are the link sorting options?

http://www.link-assistant.com/tutorial/ ... ables.html (sortBy variable)

Is it somewhere in Preferences/Link-Directory-Templates? Maybe the Tags? (though I didn't notice any sortBy tags)

Well, in the current version all links within a category are sorted alphabetically by their anchor texts. It makes the lists easier to search through.

If you think that your partners may have trouble locating their links on your site, we can re-assure you that this is rather unlikely because most webmasters use specialized software to manage their link exchange campaigns and verify inbound links. But if you still want links to appear at a fixed location, you can keep each category to a single page (simply remove perPage="10" or whatever from the code of your link directory). Unfortunately, there isn't any way to sort links by the entrance date. Adding this feature doesn't seem like a good answer to your request. Some of the older links can get removed or updated later so newer ones will be gradually shifting closer to the top of the list anyway.

I disagree strongly with what you have reassured. Site owners will be verifying the existence of links on the page they were first found in the case of trading links by email and especially in the case of completing web forms. So if their link moves its likely they will remove your link automatically.

It takes so long to scan a site to find a link if you don't know where it is. Doing this for a 1000's of links would take an eternity.

I agree sorting by date isn't the solution even when oldest first as when removing older links everyone would move up. Having no new pages at say 100 links is also unacceptable. Why would anyone want to trade links with a page that had 100's of links on it already?

So what are you suggesting?

I'm suggesting you do what you've done with the rest of the software and copy IBP.

Download the latest copy and look at their link page creation 7 different options for sorting the link pages. Also while your at it look at their email formatting particularly the box in the options that says don't break lines at 72 characters.

The best solution is to actually assign a link to a particular link page, even if you later delete some links from that page, the existing links are still on that page

This way, your link partners stay super happy

Example

Link 1: cat1_page1.html
Link 2: cat5_page4.html

Even if all the links on a particular page are deleted, then the other links are still on their assigned page

This would be a GREAT

All right, say you assign a link to page 5 and all links from page 4 will be gone later on. Page 3 will stay with 1 link on it. I doubt this is what you'd like your link directory to turn to..

In this scenario, page 5 would be created with the assigned links, page 3 would be created with the one link, and page 4 would be zapped but could be assigned new links later on, and the pagination would be 3,5.

Yes, I know it's kinda ugly, but remember, it's all about the recip link system being stable and growing. When I check my links on other sites and find that the originally assigned page no longer has my link, it can take lots of time to find if they even have it on their site anymore. I know that LA can search a few pages down but I have found some cases where my links have been moved to a page outside of the search range. This causes me to suspend their site from my system and then their system can't find their link on my site and then they suspend my link on their site, and so on.

Anyway, overall, I kinda think it would be better to assign links to a stable location so that the remote sites can always find their recip links on our site and thus cut back a little in maintenance despite the somewhat ugly results.

I dunno, anyone got any other thoughts on this?

Many thanks