KCSteve
~ Elite 1000 Member ~
How to post links
As promised, a quick little tutorial on posting links, including links to search results.
There are two basic ways you can do all of these little code things.
If you hit the 'Go Advanced' button on a reply, or if you're starting a thread you have the advanced input screen with the nice Preview option and a bunch of helpful little buttons. Hover your mouse cursor over the buttons and they'll even tell you what they do. Note: if clicking a button doesn't seem to work look up at the top of your screen for a bar where it's asking you to turn on opening the extra window for the button to work in. After you do that, click again and it should be fine.
Having been doing computers for a long time I do it the other way - I just type in the codes myself. If you know them it's actually easier.
For example, to make a word bold I can either type it, take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to highlight the word and click the bold B to make it bold or I can just type the bold tags around it as I go.
By using the HTML tag I can get the system to show you the tags rather than read them so I can show you how simple it is to make something bold:
.
All of the tags are in the same format - square brackets around the tag and a slash in front of the closing tag. They're just like HTML tags but you use square brackets instead of <>. If you hit the button to Quote a message in your reply you can see all of the tags in the quoted message.
Ok, so with that out of the way, the way you put in a link is to just... put in the link. Most of these forum systems will automatically make a full link live so if I put
http://www.igraver.com it will be live while www.igraver.com works here but not on some forums.
But to make sure the system knows it's a link just surround it with the URL (link) tag like this:
(btw, the tags are case insensitive so you can freely mix upper and lower case. I'm try to use all upper case in the examples to make them stand out)
But what if you have a really long link, like to a part in someone's catalog? Those things are a pain in forums - tend to mess up the formatting on some of them. What you want to be able to do is have a short, descriptive bit of text showing instead. That's easy if you type things. The text the URL tags surround is what's shown as the link but you can actually hide the link itself inside the opening tag like this:
Shading Tutorial
So now you know how the trick is done, let's show how to use it with forum searches.
Just click the 'Search' button and let's find a thread on... banjos, just to pick something.
So we put 'banjo' into the search box and a whole screen of results pops up. I'm going to pick one of the multi-page ones and go to something past the first page and show how to link right there:
Banjo Engraving thread
Now when you click that link you go right to page three of the thead. If you scroll down to post #29 in it you'll notice that the term I searched for (banjo) is highlighted. That's the '&highlight=banjo' part of the hidden URL. If I didn't want the highlights to show I'd put this as the link instead:
All I had to do was trim off the bit about the highlight.
Banjo Engraving thread
The 't=xxx' is which thread - look up at the address bar and you can see what thread this one is. The 'page=x' is pretty obvious. The ampersand (&) just separates the arguments. This paragraph is just for those who weren't confused.
Ok, so that should be it. Now I'll go actually start this new thread. I've been typing this up in Notepad which is always wise for anything long. This way the system can't eat my post. I'll copy this over and then I'll use the Preview option to make sure it looks good before I actually post it.
As promised, a quick little tutorial on posting links, including links to search results.
There are two basic ways you can do all of these little code things.
If you hit the 'Go Advanced' button on a reply, or if you're starting a thread you have the advanced input screen with the nice Preview option and a bunch of helpful little buttons. Hover your mouse cursor over the buttons and they'll even tell you what they do. Note: if clicking a button doesn't seem to work look up at the top of your screen for a bar where it's asking you to turn on opening the extra window for the button to work in. After you do that, click again and it should be fine.
Having been doing computers for a long time I do it the other way - I just type in the codes myself. If you know them it's actually easier.
For example, to make a word bold I can either type it, take my hands off the keyboard and use the mouse to highlight the word and click the bold B to make it bold or I can just type the bold tags around it as I go.
By using the HTML tag I can get the system to show you the tags rather than read them so I can show you how simple it is to make something bold:
HTML:
Just put the [b]bold[/b] tags around itAll of the tags are in the same format - square brackets around the tag and a slash in front of the closing tag. They're just like HTML tags but you use square brackets instead of <>. If you hit the button to Quote a message in your reply you can see all of the tags in the quoted message.
Ok, so with that out of the way, the way you put in a link is to just... put in the link. Most of these forum systems will automatically make a full link live so if I put
http://www.igraver.com it will be live while www.igraver.com works here but not on some forums.
But to make sure the system knows it's a link just surround it with the URL (link) tag like this:
HTML:
[URL]http://www.igraver.com[/URL]But what if you have a really long link, like to a part in someone's catalog? Those things are a pain in forums - tend to mess up the formatting on some of them. What you want to be able to do is have a short, descriptive bit of text showing instead. That's easy if you type things. The text the URL tags surround is what's shown as the link but you can actually hide the link itself inside the opening tag like this:
HTML:
[url=http://www.igraver.com/shading_variations/index.shtml]Shading Tutorial[/url]So now you know how the trick is done, let's show how to use it with forum searches.
Just click the 'Search' button and let's find a thread on... banjos, just to pick something.
So we put 'banjo' into the search box and a whole screen of results pops up. I'm going to pick one of the multi-page ones and go to something past the first page and show how to link right there:
HTML:
[url=http://igraver.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5773&page=3&highlight=banjo]Banjo Engraving thread[/url]Now when you click that link you go right to page three of the thead. If you scroll down to post #29 in it you'll notice that the term I searched for (banjo) is highlighted. That's the '&highlight=banjo' part of the hidden URL. If I didn't want the highlights to show I'd put this as the link instead:
HTML:
[url=http://igraver.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5773&page=3]Banjo Engraving thread[/url]Banjo Engraving thread
The 't=xxx' is which thread - look up at the address bar and you can see what thread this one is. The 'page=x' is pretty obvious. The ampersand (&) just separates the arguments. This paragraph is just for those who weren't confused.
Ok, so that should be it. Now I'll go actually start this new thread. I've been typing this up in Notepad which is always wise for anything long. This way the system can't eat my post. I'll copy this over and then I'll use the Preview option to make sure it looks good before I actually post it.
