Organising your Link Trades

[justbondage]

For those people who don't use a 3rd party site for setting up and maintaining link trades, how do you find it best to organise your trades so you know what sites you have contacted or dealt with in the past?

I have just started recording everything in a spreadsheet, nothing fancy just some details about different sites like webmaster contact details, site URL etc, so I don't end up emailing the same person twice for a trade.

I then colour code them so I can see at a glance if I already have a link to them, if the site doesn't have a links section or if the site is blacklisted from my sites etc. etc.