I want to rewrite it so it reads “Midsummer Swing Schedule” but is still clickable. I know there must be a breezy, easy way to do this, as everyone but me seems to know how. Can someonme enlighten me—in a way that a backwards five-year-old on Nyquill could understand?
I am still baffled. OK, I start out with a long string of letters and numbers with “” and “” on either side of it. How do I get that to read “Midsummer Night Swing” and still be clickable? You tech people seem to always forget that THE REST OF US DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT. Can you take me through this, easy step by easy step?
Hell, I’m still trying to figure out the office microwave oven . . .
Save the link (with MSIE, you can just highlight it in the Address bar and hit Ctrl-C to save it).
Go to post.
Type in the string [ url="
Hit Ctrl-V to paste in the link.
Type in the string " ]
Type in the text you want to use to refer to the link: “this site,” “John’s post in this thread,” or whatever.
Type in the string [ /url ]
Obviously, omit the spaces I put in.
(I posted this once without the spaces, thinking I had “parse urls” turned off, and got lines 4-5 appearing to be an URL of which lines 6 and 7 were the link. Would a moderator please delete that version?
(I hope this doesn’t sound patronising, and I apologise if it does; I’m just trying to explain the structure of the command).
Think about the what Wisest Novel wrote.
Effectively you want to get that text on everyone’s screen. You don’t want it to be treated like ‘normal’ text, but as a link to another web page.
The solution is to mark that piece of text as different to normal text. The board software is set up so that you can do this by marking up the particular passage of text using opening and closing tags. In other words, telling the software where to begin treating that passage differently and when to stop treating it differently. That’s what the bits in square brackets do. Anything between those tags will be treated differently.
The url= tells the software how to treat this passage differently – in this case indicating a web link (as opposed to, say, using b to indicate bold text).
If you put the opening and closing tags at either end of the web address it will display it as you typed it. If you put the web address inside the opening tag, after the equals sign, it’s effectively ‘hiding’ the address inside the tag, but the board software knows that whatever text you do type between the closing tags should be used as a ‘caption’ for the hidden link.
OK, I am going to try it here. The one thing I’m unclear about is when you say, “Type in the text you want to use to refer to the link: “this site,” “John’s post in this thread,” or whatever,” WHERE do I type it, and what do I have to eliminate to make room for it?
I made a grievous mistake. When attempting to delete a double post by Scarlett67, I mistakenly deleted a non-duplicate post. However, while I was frantically trying to unpress the button :rolleyes: (why doesn’t my mouse have an “unclick” function?) I noticed that since the board was slow I had time to copy and paste the immortal wisdom contained in that post. So I reproduce i below for your viewing pleasure.
Polycarp, turning off “Automatically parse URLs” means that the software will not insert and around a link that you type in without the url tags. But if you explicitly include those tags in your post, they will be used even if Automatically parse URLS is not checked.
Example: in this post I unchecked “Automatically parse URLs”. This line will not appear as a link http://www.straightdope.com
but this one will since I manually typed in the url tags: http://www.straightdope.com
Eve: you’re well on your way to becoming a webmaster. Now go start reading HTML books instead of those soft-core “romances” that are cluttering your bookshelf.
C’mon, we all know what Eve has on her bookshelf – the inside dirt on every Hollywood star since the Gish sisters were child-star phenoms! (And the more readable of them are author’s copies, since she wrote them!)
