electro-music.com wiki | Forum / Forum Help Links

This article is a Stub, you can help this Wiki grow by expanding on it.

How to make short links on forum postings that don't mess up the page, or how to make a non working chopped-up link work ok.

As a reader and being on a PC you can switch to firefox 3 or IE those know how to break up long links. They do not know how to fix chopped-up links though.

As a writer there are a couple of tricks to make a short and/or working link:

BB Code tags. One can use the BB Code tags [url] [/url].
Service provider. One can use a short link service provider, like this one.
HTML tags. Sometimes the BB Code tags don't work as they should because the board software does not adhere to the HTML specs when interpreting the link's contents. In that case you can try to use HTML tags.

We have the following example link:

http://www.jaycar.com.au/productView.asp?ID=HP1250&CATID=32&keywords=&SPECIAL=&form=CAT&ProdCodeOnly=&Keyword1=&Keyword2=&pageNumber=&priceMin=&priceMax=&SUBCATID=280

For this one I just copied the location from somewhere and pasted it right in here. Here it works ok, but is does not always because there is a bug in the bulletin board code that interprets the links and makes them clickable. When it does not work you can try one of the alternatives mentioned.

Lets try the methods 1. .. 3. mentioned above.

1. Use the BB Codetags:

the easy way is to first think of a link text, i.e. the text that is displayed to represent the link, or the short link, depending on your point of view. The BB Code tags work like :

 [url=http://www.example.com]LinKText[url]

To make this code just type your LinkText into the message, highlight it (using mouse drag with pressed left button, or use shift + cursor left/right keys) and then click on the URL button above the composition window. You'll get :

 [url]LinkText[/url]

Now alter the [url] bit into [url=http://www.example.com] with some typing and some cut and paste work.

This will result in the link (using the long example url from above) looking like:

LinkText

2. Use a service provider

You copy the long URL to the clipboard, then you go to http://www.tiny.cc and you past your clipboard contents into the dialog there. Then you hit the doit button and you'll get a translated link in your clipboard which replaces the long one. Then go to the page composition window and paste what you got back; I got

  http://tiny.cc/f9EJ

for the example link. You can just paste such a link into your forum message without any further markup.

3. HTML tags.

Html tags work with angular brackets < and >.

The HTML link tag looks like :

 <a href="http://www.example.com" target="_blank">LinkText</a>

The href tells the browser where to go and the target tells it to open it in a new window called _blank, which is the recommended name for non specific new windows.

Using this the example link will look like :

LinkText

The HTML method works better for troublesome links than the BBCode method does.

Then there are some issues with this.

Complex links sometimes do not work with any of the methods listed, the HTML tags work best but it is the hardest method to remember ...

HTML tags show up ugly for people who have turned off HTML tags in their profile. This feature is on by default, so most people will have it on, however the HTML feature interferes with posting program fragments, and people doing that a lot will have turned the feature off - something to remember when you are posting in the ChucK section here. BB codes show up OK in that case