Do you have a long post on your profile page or in the forum? Then this is the tutorial for you.
We all use links on the internet to navigate from one site to another, or go to different pages within a site. But what about jumping to different sections of a lengthy composition? Scrolling through a long article to find a particular bit can be very irksome. Read on to find out more...
The first thing to do is to create a bookmark, this will mark the place you jump to in your article when you click on a link.
The bookmark can be text or a picture. Lets use the text below as an example...
CHAPTER 10.
*All of the editing in these instructions has to be done in the HTML editor, not in the message editor. You can search for text in the HTML editor by using the F3 key.*
To make the text into a bookmark requires editing the HTML, so click the HTML button on the toolbar above the message editor and look for your bookmark text, it will most likely be in a paragraph element, an so may look like this in the HTML editor...
<p>CHAPTER 10.</p>
To turn this into a bookmark you need to surround it with anchor tags '<a>', like this...
<p>
<a>
CHAPTER 10.
</a>
</p>
If you put the anchor tags '<a>' outside the paragraph tags '<p>' the WGT fairies will magically put more paragraph tags outside your anchor tags, creating unnecessary markup (HTML) garbage, so don't do that, and don't forget the forward slash in the closing tags ' / '.
The next thing to add to this bookmark is a unique identifier. Sounds complicated, but it's not. It's just a name that must be different from any other bookmark you create, so that your clickable link knows where to go.
This identifier is called an 'id', and its value can be almost anything, but it cannot contain spaces. It sits inside the opening anchor tag like this...
<p><a
id="chap10"
>CHAPTER 10.</a></p>
And that is the bookmark completed, next up, is the link for it.
The link to the bookmark is similar in construction, but instead of an 'id', it has an 'href'. The 'href' contains the address to your bookmark, and therefore contains the bookmark's 'id' as part of that address.
Lets start off with the text below as our link...
LINK TO CHAPTER 10.
Again you will need to go into the HTML editor to create this link. If the text is in a paragraph it will look like this...
<p>LINK TO CHAPTER 10.</p>
Similarly to the bookmark, start off by surrounding the text with anchor tags '<a>'...
<p>
<a>
LINK TO CHAPTER 10.
</a>
</p>
Next is the 'href', this goes inside the opening anchor tag '<a>'...
<p><a
href=""
>LINK TO CHAPTER 10.</a></p>
The 'href' value that goes between the double quotes is the link address and is the most important part, so be careful to get this correct.
The first part of the address is the URL of the page that your bookmark is on. So if I was doing this for a blog on my profile page, the first part of the address would be...
http://www.wgt.com/members/scotthope/default.aspx
...which is taken from the address bar on my profile page.
If the bookmark was on a forum page somewhere, it would be something like...
http://www.wgt.com/forums/t/211491.aspx
The next step is to add on to the end of that URL the unique indentifier 'id' that we put in our bookmark...
<p><a id="
chap10
" >CHAPTER 10.</a></p>
Adding that onto the end of the URL requires putting a hash '#' (number symbol) inbetween the two...
http://www.wgt.com/members/scotthope/default.aspx
#chap10
And adding that to the href in our link completes the process...
<p><a href="http://www.wgt.com/members/scotthope/default.aspx#chap10">LINK TO CHAPTER 10.</a></p>
The link can go anywhere, and I mean literally anywhere on the internet, but that would be a bit odd! Somewhere in your article would be the usual choice, and the bookmark goes where you want to jump to when you click the link, and you can have as many or as few as you like. But remember, the bookmark id's must all be different. You can also make the bookmark into a link, so that it serves a double purpose. Which means you can click on the bookmark to take you to somewhere else in the article, maybe back to the original link or perhaps a main menu.
And we're done!
I always say that to explain this stuff is a lot more complicated than actually doing it, and this is no exception. It feels that I've done a lot more here than showing how to create a link and a bookmark, but it's not as bad as this epic post would suggest. Take it one step at a time and hopefully it'll make sense. Don't just look at the whole thing and walk away. You can do it. ; )
Thank you.