I spend a lot of my time correcting links that people post on the website. It is starting to take away from my enjoyment of reading people's comments. So I thought I'd be proactive and talk about the two easy ways you the average poster can post the URL of your choice.

So lets say you want to post a link to this url: http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2998923.ece The first step in making the link worthwhile is to think of why someone would want to click on it. The story is about the new XBox 360 game Halo 3. So I would probably say something like "Halo 3 hits the streets today!". Now I want to make that text the link. On our website below the textbox where you can write content is a toggle that says "enable rich-text" or "disable rich text". This tells you if you are using our fancy html editor or not. If the link says "enable" you are just writing plain old html and you need to follow the manual method. If it says "disable" you are using the fancy javascript editor. I'll go over this way first, so if you want to try it out (this is what the test forum is for) make sure you hit the "enable rich-text" and follow these steps.

1. Highlight the text you want to make the link.
2. When you highlight right click on the text you highlighted. This will bring up a context menu.
3. Select "Insert/Edit Link". This brings up a dialog where you can paste the link in and control what happens when people click on it.
4. Click "Insert" when you are done. Now the link appears! To remove the link just right click and hit "unlink"

So if you are a html freak like myself and don't use the rich text editor the steps are not much more difficult, just a little strange.

1. Put the following before the words you want to turn in to a link, replacing your URL with mine: <a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/sci_tech/article2998923.ece">
2. After the text you would like to make a link just put </a>
3. Remember close all your open tags or I will have to fix them!

If you find that while previewing your post that the html is showing up, this means you were in rich-text mode when you thought you were in HTML mode. No worries. Just "cut" the text that is in html, hit "disable rich-text" and "paste" it in. All fixed!

Happy link making!

Wm