Let’s say you have an interest in posting something about the latest in Steampunk gadgets. You might begin by saying that Steampunk is a name given to a genre of fiction in which Steam Power has a greater hold and meshes with the technological advances we see around us today. For a more complete definition, and to avoid having to think very much and also keep to this side of plagiarism, we can refer the reader to Wikipedia. We would type something like this:

‘Wikipedia has a more complete definition here.’ Of course, our intent is to have the word ‘here’ underlined and providing a link to the Wikipedia page. None of it is automagic, so we actually have to do the legwork and find the page we want to link to…

Hopping over to Wikipedia in a different browser window and a quick search later I find this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk

Well, that’s great, but how do I marry these two into active content? That is, how do I make my ‘here’ word up there link to ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk’ without making it all uglified? Easy peasy.

Scroll up to where the word ‘here’ is, and click and drag to highlight it. Then click the button with the chain links and a little popup will appear that has three input controls. Paste the ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steampunk’ into the first and that’s all there is to it. Click the insert button. Now when you publish (or save, if you’re just editing) it will show that word as a link. Now ‘here’ becomes ‘here‘.

The other two controls in that popup are for making a link appear in a new window, but because of the way Wordpress is set up, I don’t think it will let you do that unless you’re an administrator, which is probably a bug. It’s generally considered bad form to hijack someones browser that way (even though I generally disagree), and anyway, hey, it’s free.

So now that you’re empowered, you can go all link crazy. Crazy, man. You just have to make sure that the link is correct or it won’t work. There might be all kinds of fancy stuff you can do!

If in the course of your day-to-day you find some page or resource that supports your post, you can go back in and edit in the link later. Great stuff - enjoy.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 6:48 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.