LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

greenspun.com : LUSENET : Leica Photography : One Thread

If you want to let your viewers click on a link to direct them to some other page out there on the web, and I'll use the intro page to this site as my example, then here's what you do.

Take the URL, which in my case is:

http://www.alaska.net/~rowlett/leicaforum.htm

That much is easy. Now you have to put a bit of HTML in. Here's what you do:

Begin to make the link with:

That's all the HTML you need!! Now all you have to do is put the cursor in between the two quote marks and paste in your URL (if you copied it from somewhere) with Ctrl+V (or Edit, Paste). The only other thing you need to put in is the text that you want to appear as the link. Just type it in before the last "<" symbol.

So, for my example, I do this:

<a href="http://www.alaska.net/~rowlett/leicaforum.htm">CLICK HERE FOR THE LEICA FORUM</a>

The above should look like this:

CLICK HERE FOR THE LEICA FORUM

Now that I've typed all that in, I sure hope it looks OK when I press submit! :-)

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@alaska.net), January 05, 2001

Answers

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Thanks for the lesson Tony. I wanted to try to do it with one of the photos I listed below. See if this works. low light portrait fuji 400 Superia

-- Andrew Schank (aschank@flash.net), January 05, 2001.

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

How about that-it worked! I'll try one more-this should connect to a page over at photo.net with one of my gallery shots. My micro hot rod Fiat Abarth at speed

-- Andrew Schank (aschank@flash.net), January 05, 2001.

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Now all we want to know is how Tony managed to write his example WITHOUT making it into a clickable link after his sentence "So, for my example, I do this:"! :-)

That's probably plain magic.

-- Peter Olsson (peter.olsson@lulebo.se), January 05, 2001.


Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

<a href="">

Not really magic... to make the HTML tags show up, rather than execute, you have to enter the 'less than' and 'greater than' as lt or gt surrounded by ampersand (at the beginning) and a semicolon. The browser then displays them as < and >. The best way to see that, of course, is to just view the source.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), January 05, 2001.


Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Tony:

Why do you need a semi colon?

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), January 06, 2001.



Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Art, the semicolon is used only in conjunction with the ampersand to surround the special character to indicate to the browser to display the character instead of interpret it. In this case, the special character is the angle bracket or "less than" or "greater than" symbol. You can't just type it in because it won't display.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), January 07, 2001.

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

How do you make paragraph breaks in HTML? For example, the links I tried to create run on despite my trying to format them as a separate paragraph as you did above.

-- Erik X (xx@xx.com), January 07, 2001.

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Erik, what you must do is place the p tag within the angle brackets, for example:

This is a paragraph.  Blah blah blah.
<p>
This is the second paragraph.  Blah blah blah.


-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), January 07, 2001.

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Tony:

I still don't understand. I know how to write lt and gt and have it appear. I teach this stuff. I just wanted to know why and where you use a semicolon. Not questioning you; just thought that I might learn something new.

Art

-- Art (AKarr90975@aol.com), January 07, 2001.


Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

Art, I read under "Special Characters" which is under "Tips-n-Tricks" which is at this internet tutorial that the symbol for special characters is "...always held between an ampersand and a semicolon." I suspect the semicolon may not actually be required, such is the case with the closing of the <p> tag, i.e. </p> - it may be just a formality.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), January 07, 2001.


Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

How come andrew's link turned out blue, like a real pro, and the rest are just plain black? Can we make them red or green?

-- Bob Fleischman (RFXMAIL@prodigy.net), January 17, 2001.

Response to LESSON: Inserting 'clickable links' inside your posts

If I'm not mistaken, I think the color of 1) plain text; 2) links; 3) previously visited links; and 4) "hovered-over" or "active" links are all defined within the "text" argument in the HTML "body" of a specific web page. If these items are defined specifically, as they are with the greenspun.com forums, then individual posts to the greenspun.com forums (like this one) will have no control over the color of the links. Making changes to your browser defaults is an exception to this, but then all pages would reflect these changes, not just the greenspun.com forum pages. Clear as pea soup, I know.

-- Tony Rowlett (rowlett@mail.com), January 18, 2001.

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