Customization question

In the link manager options.

In the Link Manager ? “Various settings for the link manager.”
Hmm, am I blind? can’t find where I would change the text before the links?

Found it! Under Links – Linkcategories

Another ‘?’: How on earth do I get rid of the list formatting? I have removed <il> in the “Linkcategoreies settings” but the list formatting is still there (aswell as the list formatting of the archives)
TIA

The link formatting is controlled by CSS.
menu ul and the derivatives of that.
Is there a specific layout you are after ?

I have removed the

• and

from the Link Categories options page, and set the category name to a null value but still get the following markup:
<li id="">

• ... list content here ...
• ... list content here ...
• ... etc ...

I want to remove the orphan <li id=””> and

from around the unordered list. What am I missing here?
(Or do I have to go in and edit on of the WP files directly?)

Apologies for the overformatting! Here’s the code again, in an easier to read format:
<li id="">

• ... list content here ...
• ... list content here ...
• ... etc ...

You can try replacing the get_link_list call with get_linkbyname. Look in links.php for the actual arguments it expects. It seems to pay attention to the Link Manager prefix and suffix settings. I tried it for a little while last night, but it wouldn’t present the final list sorted alphabetically, or indeed in any other way that I could see, so I tore that all out and went back to the unordered list method.

No. We are on the wrong lines here. The default style for a list is with dots. If you do not like them (or want to replace them with an image) turn them off in the css. The trick is to go as high up the nesting as you need to put in the fix, then the effect will cascade down and be inherited by the elements. eg if in #menu you add : list-style-type: none; that will kill everything.

I don’t mind having the unordered list al all – in fact I want that for the links themselves, as I currently have them displayed as a list in my MT install.
What I don’t want is the nested lists — all I want is a single unordered list with the links. WP seems to want to impose an unordered list with the headings, then the content nested as <ul&gts inside that. I use <h3>s as my headings with the unordered lists for the content.
I know you can turn off the styling using CSS — this is easy to do — but I think it is a bit more semantically correct to use a heading tag to denote a heading, rather than a list item, and want to keep doing this.
You can see what I mean by viewing the source of my MT blog – https://www.selfgratification.org/

You did say twice in your questions that you wanted to change the formatting of the links which in fairness is a CSS issue.

This is true – I should have been clearer. I actually meant the code that was output, rather than the styling. My apologies.