People have asked about how to create hyperlinks here at Open Salon. (A hyperlink is a clickable region of text.) This is a quick tutorial just for that and nothing else.

There are, sadly, about a half dozen different input contexts that you might need to do this in and the rules differ slightly for HTML in each of them. That makes explaining everything harder. For example, you can't use hyperlinks at all in OS's private mail (sometimes called “PM”) system. But in a number of other contexts you can use the techniques here.

Inserting Hyperlinks in Comments

If you want to make a comment with a hyperlink, like this:

You want to type this into a comment box:

That is, you want to start your hyperlink with this textual marking:

and finish with this textual marking:

Everything in between those two things is a hyperlink to the URL you have placed where it says “put URL here”.

Debugging Tip: The quotation marks in the start must be straight quotes ("...") and may not be the fancy curly quotes (“...”) or it won't work.

The hard part is believing it will work. There is no preview. There is no undo, although if you make a real mess the thread owner might be willing to delete your comment and let you try again. There is just holding your breath and hoping it works.

If you want to know more detail about how it works, you can see my HTML tutorial for OS users.

That tutorial does not explain, though, why you can do that in a comment and you can't do other HTML things in a comment. The answer is that the thing that lets you type comments sweeps over your comment and removes all HTML except a specific set of things, and the anchor markup is one thing it lets go through.

Inserting Hyperlinks in Posts

If you were to do this in the blog post editor, by contrast, it wouldn't work. Your post would come out looking just like that, less-than and greater-than signs would probably appear visibly rather than turning into a hyperlink. But if you clicked on the little HTML icon in the post editor, you'd enter a place where you could type HTML. You probably don't want to do that because if you don't know HTML it will confuse you. So the post editor avoids the problem by letting you take text like this:

Drag over the part you want to hyperlink and click the icon that looks like a chain link:

You will get a dialog asking for a Link URL. Type the link in that box. You can leave the title blank. Click Insert to confirm.

Things should now be as you want: