A small utility function that I used to sort the names of people who commented on my blog.

(defun org-get-link-desc-from-list ()
  """ Get link description of a list item containing just links """
  (let* ((item-beg (point))
       (item-end (org-end-of-item))
       (cur-item (buffer-substring-no-properties
                  item-beg item-end)))
    (goto-char item-beg)
    (org-columns-compact-links cur-item)))

sort-lines wasn’t good enough for me, since it was sorting alphabetically and it ended up being the sorted order of the urls and not the names. This function, when used with org-sort-entries-or-items gave me what I wanted.

Thanks to benny (on #org-mode), I also learnt the difference between let and let*.