WordPress get_links

Actually I was only trying to get the list of links in the sidebar sorted by the time of their last update. Naïvely, I tried to just pass get_links() the ‘_updated’ parameter, but it didn’t work. Since the codex is more or less down, and googling using a search engine didn’t help much, I resorted to just reading the fine code. So, to answer my own questions for posteriority and those using a search engine to find out about get_links:

1. passing ‘_updated’ should work; contrary to what some believe, it does not sort by ‘time you last edited the link’, but really tries to sort on ‘time the link last updated’;
2. if it does not work, that’s probably because api.pingomatic.com is timing out since forever, despite ‘servers donated by automattic’;
3. all blogroll-updating plugins I found do all sorts of weird things, but don’t work in the end; I for one t hink that asking any number of services for all changes they registered in the last 5 or 10 minutes and then manually filtering for entries in ones blogroll is, well, overkill, not to mention that it causes a load of unnecessary traffic on both ends;
4. as of now, there doesn’t seem to be a plugin that does the obvious thing, namely to just check the goddamn RSS feeds I manually entered for every link in my blogroll!

which leads us to

1. link lists in WordPress are in a sorry state of affairs, and
2. I should probably write such a plugin.