Just a quick note to the web designers out there: like many people, I hate link underlining, so I disable it in my browser. This means that if you’re going to make the color of your links the same as the color of the surrounding text (or nearly so), you should use CSS to force link underlining. Sure, I could enable underlining, but that’s not my job. If your design requires underlined links, it’s up to you to make it happen. Luckily, it’s not hard:

 a { text-decoration: underline; }

added to your site stylesheet does the trick.

Quite a few sites fall into the rely-on-the-browser-underlining trap. Notable members of this dubious club include the otherwise excellent Economist website and, ironically, the “design and usability blog” Signal vs. Noise. I love Rails, but I curse those 37signals guys every time I have to enable link underlining just to read their damn blog.