So, you’re writing a comment on a post, or posting a quick aside here at the roadhouse, and you realize that you’d like to insert a link to make your point. Not only that, but you want to insert your very own witty text, and have THAT link to the source material, instead of just throwing down a random string of letters and numbers that happen to make up the web address.
Good news! This handy Addison Road tutorial will show you how to create a basic link. We want the end result to look like this:
Hey everyone, look at my nuts!
Whoah! That was cool? How’d we do it? By using voodoo magic! And a little bit of standard text. The process for creating a link in comments is different than it is in a post, so I’ll cover both.
links in comments
To generate the link above, I typed the following text:
<a href=”http://www.somisnuthouse.com/”>my nuts</a>
If you type that into the comments, it will automatically reformat itself into a link, just like the one above. Here’s how to change it so that it shows the text you want.
<a href=”http://THEWEBADDRESS.COM”>YOUR WITTY TEXT</a>
Some helpful hints:
- Remember the web address goes in quotes.
- Remember to include the http:// part of the web address. If you just copy and past from the address bar in your browser, you should be fine.
- If you don’t put the slash in front of the last </a>, the whole rest of the blog becomes a part of your link. Way to go. Jerk.
- If you include a link in your comment, it will probably be held for moderation. That doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong, it just means we hate, HATE spam, and our automatic robot machine thinks you might be spam.
Go ahead, try it out in the comments below. We won’t make fun of you if you screw it up. Well, Systems Administrator Bobby will, but he’s a jerk. The rest of us are a bunch of nice people.
Got it? Great! Now on to posting links in a post:
links in posts
Couldn’t be easier. First, type the witty text that you want to have link somewhere. Then, highlight it:
At the top of your post editor, you’ll see a toolbar that looks like this:
Make sure your link text is highlighted, then click on this button: 
A popup will appear, asking you to insert the web address of the thing you want to link to. Paste the address of your link into that top box. The other options you can leave just as they are.
Click insert. That’s it! Your text is now linked.
Questions? Comments? Cash donations? Hit the comments below. Be sure to include plenty of links to illustrate your point.
More evidence why I use WYSIWYG. The left side of my brain atrophied a looooong time ago.
Now could you do one on how to get the rotating tag lines in the banner of a blog? That’s what I want.
betsy: nope - trade secret. The only way to get a quote in the taglines is to say something funny in a post or comment. Then, the all-powerful blog admin will insert it manually into the code.
no no - I want to find a similar script, so I can liven up my sad little blog with rotating obscure pop lyric fragments.
(As you can see, as an admin, I am not quite all-powerful….and as a commenter, I am not as funny as I would have imagined.)
aha!
For that, you will need to talk to our in-house geek-tastic systems wizard, Bobby. He patched it together for us, but it’s fairly geeky, and embedded into our actual blogging software. I don’t know how you might go about doing something similar with blogspot.
Hi Michael,
I arrived here because I noticed an incoming link for which I have no idea where it’s coming from here, but I’m very glad I found your post!
I’m sadly as HTML challenged as it gets, this is a great help for comments. Thanks for posting it.
But my blog doesn’t have anything similar to the editing buttons I see in your screen shot. I’m using WordPress. Is this a plugin? If so, can you tell me what it is so I can do a search for it?
Deborah
It might be a function of which web browser you’re using. I took these screen shots with Firefox. If you’re using Internet Explorer or Safari, it will probably look a little different.
You might also check in your user settings. There is an option to use the rich text editor (maybe called the visual editor) or not. If it’s checked, you should see a similar toolbar to the one posted above.
Well, well, well, this is a heck of a cool thing to learn!
Sigh. Now I have to wait for “moderation”…whatever the heck THAT is (what IS that, Mike? Is that you sitting in your underwear with nothing better to do than make judgements about our pearls?) to see if this worked…
Sigh.
Moderation is me being wise enough to know that my friends cannot be trusted with being able to post whatever they want, whenever they want.
Think of me as Big Brother, helping you do what I think is best for you.
I already think of you that way.
Yeah, but SOMEBODY give me a kiss for actually figuring the damn thing out!
And another thing, Mike: Do you think it’s FUN to type that code stuff? You DO think it’s fun, don’t you? Oh my gosh. This is worse than I’d previously suspected…
hi, have we just met? do you not know me?
code is poetry.
That’s why Systems Admin Bobby is a jerk. It’s not fun.
And it doesn’t rhyme.