How To Create A Hotlink In This Forum

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The following instructions are for people who want to create an indented hotlink in a post to this forum. It's pretty simple to do but you must be able to follow these instructions precisely. This is not intended as a general purpose guide to using HTML (the 'language' of the web). If you simply copy and save the template below, then modify and paste it when you need it, you should be able to create hotlinks without too much trouble.

Important: The example below uses the HTML paragraph tag ('<p>'). One quirk I've noticed about this forum - once you've used the paragraph tag once within a post, you must use the tag between all other paragraphs in your post or all of your paragraphs will run together.

To include an indented hotlink, copy and save the template below: 

<p>
<blockquote>
<a href="XXX">XXX</a>
</blockquote>
<p>

When you paste this into a response, you will need to replace BOTH occurances of 'XXX' with the URL (i.e. the address) of the site you want to reference. For example, if you are are trying to point someone to Ed Yourdon's home page, the URL is 'http://www.yourdon.com/index.htm'. This means that, once complete, your inserted link will look like this in the response window: 

<p>
<blockquote>
<a href="http://www.yourdon.com/index.htm">http://www.yourdon.com/index.htm</a>
</blockquote>
<p>

(The addresses will NOT be red - I've simply added the color here for clarity.) DON'T CHANGE ANYTHING ELSE! Once posted, your link will appear as follows:

http://www.yourdon.com/index.htm

If you want the displayed text to be something different than the URL (not advised for beginners) then replace the SECOND 'xxx' with the text you want displayed. Using the example above, if you wanted the displayed text to be "Mr. Yourdon's Home Page", the template would look like this 

<p>
<blockquote>
<a href="http://www.yourdon.com/index.htm">Mr. Yourdon's Home Page</a>
</blockquote>
<p>

(Again, the color will not be red or green - I've just added it here for clarity) Once posted, it will look like this:

Mr. Yourdon's Home Page

Hope this helps.

-Arnie

-- Arnie Rimmer (arnie_rimmer@usa.net), January 06, 1999

Answers

See also HTML Posting Techniques...

http:// www.milesresearch.com/y2k/howtohtm.htm



-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), January 06, 1999.

Update on composing HTML for replies (1999-01-06)

This is the simplest method for writing formatted replies. Having tried out many approaches, I always use this method.

Use Word to make a new document (Ctrl+n). Write your reply in this document window. You can drag in URLs and shortcuts or you can manually insert them with Alt+i, i. Use all the familiar Word text controls.

If your default font is set to 10 point, select the whole text (Alt+a) and change it to 12 point Times New Roman. If you want to permanently change the default text font size from 10 to 12 (a very good idea), follow these steps:

  1. Format, Style (Alt+o,s)
  2. Modify (Alt+m)
  3. Format, Font (Alt+o, f)
  4. Size (Alt+s)
  5. Change to 12 point (DownArrow --twice)
  6. Save changes (Enter --three times)

Proofread your reply for how it looks overall. Then save the file, give it a descriptive name, such as 'Hyperlinks 1'. The suggested title will be the first line of text up to the first punctuation.

Now save the file as HTML (Alt+f,h). At this point you may notice some small changes in the appearance of your text. For example two consecutive lines that you want with single vertical spacing may each become a paragraph, with 1.5 spacing. To fix this, go to the end of the first line and type Shift+Enter, then Delete. This changes the paragraph break to a line break. Shift+Enter is how you insert a <br> from the visual mode.

When the message is complete and looks correct, save the file again, then:

  1. Go to the View HTML Source mode with Alt+v, s. (When finished with this mode, use Alt+v, s again to exit the source code view.)
  2. From the View HTML Source mode, select the part of the text that you want to post, starting right after the opening body tag (which is: <body>) and its parameters, and stopping right before the closing body tag (which is: </body>). If it's preceded by a closing paragraph tag (which is: </p>), stop selecting right before that to avoid an extra blank line.
  3. Copy selected HTML code to clipboard (Ctrl+c)
  4. Flip to the browser (Alt+Tab), and go to the posting reply input text box and paste (Ctrl+v). Check through the text (especially the opening and closing) to review for missing tags.
  5. Put in a carriage return (Enter) after each starting anchor hypertext reference tag (after the greater-than symbol in <a href="url">), to shorten the nonblank character sequence, improving BBS reply formatter survival. These types of source code changes do not survive a save with the Word formatter, so they need to be done in the input box.
  6. Hit submit, and when done right, your reply will look exactly like it does in Word.


-- Jon (jonmiles@pacbell.net), January 06, 1999.
Clarification: in setting the default font for the Normal style, when applying the change with the 3 Enters at the end, check the "Add to template" (Alt+a) and "Automatically Update" (Alt+u) checkboxes before you Okay out of the Modify Style dialog box.

And to make the link text different from the URL the way Arnie describes, go to the View HTML Source mode and change the second occurrence of the URL (the one between the tags). Then save (Ctrl+s), then back to normal view (Alt+v,s), make sure it looks right, then go to View HTML Source and select the code for posting.

-- Jon (jonmiles@pacbell.net), January 06, 1999.

Inserting a Hyperlink

Using the above described method, you can either drag an icon or link, or copy and paste URLs into the Word doc to form a hyperlink. If the link is not automatically created from a pasted URL, put the cursor at the end of the URL and hit Enter. Assuming the default Autocorrect setting is on this make a plaintext URL into a hyperlink. To view or modify this setting go to Tools, Autocorrect (Alt+t,a), Click the Autoformat tab, and set the "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks" checkbox to checked (Alt+i).

To place into the Word document a hyperlink to a page visible in a browser window, copy the current URL by dragging the small HTML icon (next to the address box in the broswer window) to the point of the text in the Word document where it is to appear. To copy hyperlinks from the content of the browser document, drag them the same way. This includes picture links such as nav buttons but also works for text links. Word will normally convert these to hyperlinked URL with the URL also as the displayed caption of the link. To preserve the hyperlink being captioned with custom text, select the link with the pointer and copy to clipboard, then paste into the Word doc.

If the document is going to be added to or modified, then it may be best to store it in both formats, Word and HTML. This way the file can be opened up for editing with Word by clicking on the Word doc icon. When done editing in Word, save (Ctrl+s) and reconvert to HTML (Alt+f,h) and save (Ctrl+s); when done editing in HTML, save (Crtl+s) and reconvert to Word (Alt+f,r) and save (Ctrl+s). You can drag URLs on to the Word doc or HTML doc.

-- Jon (jonmiles@pacbell.net), January 06, 1999.

Whew.................!! OK.....if y'all say so! I will give it a try. Thanks to everyone.

Taz

-- Taz (Tassie @aol.com), April 21, 1999.

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