Special topic created as this question comes up from time to time. Stored under Memories > “Tips for this blog”. These instructions are written while using the Firefox web browser in Windows XP. In other browsers and/or operating systems, the details will differ a bit. This is by no means the only way of adding a link, just a pretty bullet-proof set of steps intended for those who aren’t familiar with HTML – those who are shouldn’t need to read this. The details about LiveJournal buttons are for people adding comments – the interface for blog postings is slightly different.
When discussing menu commands, “Edit > Paste” is shorthand for clicking “Edit” in the menu bar and then “Paste” on the menu that drops down. “Ctrl+C” means that you hold down the “Ctrl” key, type C and then release the Ctrl key.)
- Find: In a separate browser window or tab from the blog entry or LiveJournal Comment Form, display the web page you want to link to. At the top of the browser window, there may now be a box showing text like http://community.livejournal.com/times_xwd_times/426203.html – this is the URL (“web address”) of the page.
- Copy: In that box, select the whole of the URL by dragging the mouse pointer across it or by right-clicking the box and choosing “Select All” from the pop-up menu. Now choose Edit > Copy from the browser window’s menu, or press Ctrl+C. The URL is now on the Windows Clipboard. If you’re thinking “What the heck is the Windows clipboard?” read about it here. If the “address box” doesn’t appear at the top of the browser, try right-clicking on the page itself and choosing View Page Info. In the Page Info dialog, you can drag the mouse across the “Address:” field and then press Ctrl+C.
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Prepare: Back in the window where you’re typing your comment, type the following, EXACTLY as it appears here, wherever you want the link to appear:
<a href=""></a> Note the use of angle brackets, two double-quote characters, and one forward slash among the other bits and pieces. This is a framework into which we’ll insert a URL and a “label”.
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Paste: Move the cursor so that it’s between the two double quotes and choose Edit > Paste or type Ctrl+V. The URL will now appear between the quotes. The “label” is the text you want to appear as a blue-underlined link (green-underlined on this site, but blue in other contexts). You type this between the closing and opening angle brackets shown just before “/a”. So if you want to link to wikipedia’s article on a certain well-known crossword animal, you should end up with part of your comment text looking something like this in the editing form:
It's that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okapi">giraffid mammal</a> again!
which will look like this in the comment everyone else sees:
It’s that giraffid mammal again!
- Test: If you get it wrong (e.g. by omitting or mistyping a single character in the framework), the link will not work. So the final step is to test it, before looking a chump in public: choose the “Check Spelling and Preview” option in the Comment Form, then press the Post Comment button. In the Comment Preview form, press the Preview button and ensure that the preview shown above the editing box includes the link as it should appear. Test it by right-clicking the link and choosing Open Link in New Tab. If the new tab contains the right page, everything has worked. You can now press Submit.
– copy the html formula shown in the paragraph “prepare” above. Keep it somewhere handy, eg on a post-it note or something
– between the two quotation marks, post the url you want to link to
– between the two pointy brackets that point to each other paste the word(s) you want to highlight for people to click on.
Job done!