Formatting links within reviews and articles is an integral part of connecting your work with the rest of the internet world. As much as possible, we like readers to have the option to click on related links.
The goal of this page is to make the process of hotlinking a URL as simple and clear as possible for any computer user. It starts with a few definitions and proceeds to two very simple examples.
DEFINITIONS: (skip ahead if you are an experienced internet user)
- URL: the address of a web page. URL's start with "http://" and appear in your browser's address box.
- link: an object (image or text) which you can click upon to visit a new address. Text links appear in most browsers as underlined blue text.
- hotlink: to activate an URL using HTML code, as described on this page. This converts a URL from text form to a link.
All you have to do to hotlink a URL is cut and paste text twice into the following examples.
LINKING TO AN EXTERNAL SITE:
This applies to any address outside www.allaboutjazz.com.
(Note: this will open a new browser window with the link you select.)
<A HREF=http://www.milesdavis.com TARGET=_BLANK>Miles Davis</A>
LINKING TO A SITE WITHIN ALL ABOUT JAZZ:
Simply delete "http://www.allaboutjazz.com" from the left side of the URL. That means the text you paste will start with a single slash.
For example, "http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/review_center.php" would become "/php/review_center.php"
This step is important because internal links load a lot faster without the prefix.
<A HREF= /php/review_center.php
>
