From time to time, someone asks how to put a hyperlink in a posting. I am no HTML guy, but thought I would share a couple of things I have learned about about posting at BPL. (Suggestions for improving this post are welcome.)
Example of the source for a hyperlink:
<a href="http://www.backpackinglight.com">BPL</a>
The same hyperlink, live: BPL
To create your own hyperlink, just:
- replace "http://www.backpackinglight.com" with your own URL (the quotation marks are required)
- replace "BPL" with whatever text string you want to appear in your posting
- include the result in your posting
The BPL posting mechanism does not handle an "@" sign in URLs, such as Flickr URLs. You can get around that by replacing the "@" with "%40". (Thanks, Kerry Rodgers.)
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Handling long URLs — use tinyurl
You cannot (successfully) handle very long URLs this way (a BPL software limitation?). The solution is to use http://tinyurl.com/ to create a shorter, but equivalent, URL.
- Go to http://tinyurl.com/
- Enter the long (i.e. real) URL and click the button
- Choose one of the two choices it gives you (direct, or preview). Use that URL in place of the original (long) URL.
I wish I could quantify how long is too long, but I can't. If anyone knows, please chime in and I'll modify this post to reflect that.
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Referring to a specific post in a thread
The easiest way to get the URL for a specific post is to click on a link that takes you directly to that post. The URL the browser shows will then be the correct one.
Otherwise, you need to construct the correct URL. To do that, you need two things:
1) The ID of the specific post
2) The URL of the thread that post is in
Getting a specific post's ID
The ID of a specific post appears to be an overall sequence number for postings. Adjacent postings in the same thread will not necessarily have adjacent, or even close, IDs. The best way to find the ID of the specific post is to get it from the page's HTML:
- Look at the page's HTML source, such as by using one of the following ways:
- Choose View Page Source from the right-mouse menu
- Select from just before the post to within the post, and then choose View Selection Source from the right-mouse menu
- In the source, find the post you want to refer to, such as by searching for some of its text
- Look back (up) at the post's heading for a line like </table><a name="97772"></a>
- The digits after name= are the post's ID, in this case 97772
Forming the specific post's URL
Look at the URL from the browser. The part after "forum_thread_id=" is the interesting part. Depending on how you got to the page, it will look something like one of the following:
- forum_thread_id=13314&startat=20
- forum_thread_id=13314&disable_pagination=1
- forum_thread_id=13314&skip_to_post=264865#264865
The first number after "forum_thread_id=", 13314 in this case, is the thread ID.
To create the specific post's URL:
- take the URL from the browser
- replace everything from the "&" after the thread ID with "&skip_to_post=97772#97772", where "97772" is the ID of the specific post
In this example, that would be:
<first part of the URL>forum_thread_id=13314&skip_to_post=97772#97772
As an example, the link to Kerry Rodgers' post earlier in this post was done that way — his post's URL is http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/thread_display.html?forum_thread_id=13314&skip_to_post=204575#204575.
Always test your URL after posting it
Enjoy!
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