Hi Everyone,
Thinking about all the really long urls that have been included as links in many posts over the years, I figured a housekeeping & formatting suggestion might be in order. I hope no one minds.

There are two ways to post a link on this forum.

1. Put the address between two url tags:
   [color:"#cc0000"][ur[/color][color:"#cc0000"]l][/color]http://www.equipped.org/[color:"#cc0000"][/u[/color][color:"#cc0000"]rl][/color].
   This creates a link that looks like http://www.equipped.org/.
2. Put the address within the first url tag, and some link text between the two url tags:
   [color:"#cc0000"][color:"#cc0000"]/www.equipped....org/]link text.
   (This allows you to decide how long you want the link to be when the page is rendered!)

For shorter urls, either method works equally well, and the only reason to use one over the other is aesthetics. The problem is with very long urls. They don't wrap, so they force the webpage to become wider than it should be for easiest readability.

The first method listed above ends up being written like
[color:"#cc0000"][ur[/color][color:"#cc0000"]l][/color]http://www.equipped.org/ubbthreads/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Board=campfire&Number=20458&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=&vc=1[color:"#cc0000"][/u[/color][color:"#cc0000"]rl][/color].
This ends up looking like http://www.equipped.org/ubbthreads/showt...o=&vc=1

The second method listed above is written like
[color:"#cc0000"][color:"#cc0000"]/www.equipped...;vc=1]link text.
(Again, this gives you control over how long the link ends up being on the rendered page!)

I hope my explanation & examples were clear. I would encourage everyone who cares about such things to use the second method whenever dealing with longer than normal urls. It's tidier.

Stay safe,
J.T.

Thanks for some good info. I generally just type the page, i.e. www.equipped.org, with no url tags. Seems to add the link automatically. For longer addresses I've used the old copy/paste method only because I could never figure out the text link method. It's really ironic. I routinely work on systems that carry tens of thousands of telephone customers but simple tasks on my home PC routinely kick my butt.

Ed

Great tips! And don't forget about using http://www.tinyurl.com. It can turn this: http://www.equipped.org/ubbthreads/newre...=1&vc=1

Into this: http://tinyurl.com/suk4

I use this frequently when I want to refer someone to some huge link at Amazon or Ebay or something. Retail sites are notorious for producing huge URLs. One thing to reiterate that J.T. has mentioned before is that URLs that include a session ID sometimes won't work for another person.

Never knew this.
As one of the guilty culprits, I will heed your advice.

Easy Solution.
Got to www.tinyurl.com and you get a little script that converts huge URLs into Tiny ones.

This:
http://www.equipped.org/ubbthreads/showt...&fpart=

Becomes this:
http://tinyurl.com/svq8

Easy, nice and wonderful.

Robert & Martin,
I've never heard about tinyurl.com before. That's useful; thanks!

Ed,
That's interesting about the forum changing urls into links by itself.
I was unaware it did that. Being me, I must now do a test! <img src="images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Here is a fully quallified url followed by some non-fully qualified ones.
I will type them all as text, placing none of these in url tags.
Let's see which ones convert into links on their own...
http://www.equipped.org/
http://www.equipped.org
www.equipped.org/
www.equipped.org
equipped.org/
equipped.org

Okay, enough geek tricks for one day.
Back to survival stuff... <img src="images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

Stay safe,
J.T.

You're my hero!

AMEN!

John

Jet,

Thanks for the great explainations. I'll have to try your methods the next time I provide a link. Up untill now, I've just typed or copy pasted the links. You certainly have my attention.

Regards,
Comanche7

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