How to link

The Short Version

If you want to link to me because you’ve used one of my my photos, please use one of these pieces of code:

This site:
<a href=”http://peteashton.com”>Photo by Pete Ashton</a>

MySpace:
<a href=”http://www.myspace.com/peteashton”>Photo by Pete Ashton</a>

Flickr:
<a href=”http://flickr.com/photos/peteashton/”>Photo by Pete Ashton</a>

The Long Version

This last year has seen a massive increase in what I’d guess you could call “enfranchisement” within the online sphere. Or in other words, loads of people have gotten an online presence that goes beyond a simple homepage, a presence that they’re actually using to communicate rather than just having because it seemed like the thing to do. Be it a blog, a MySpace profile, a Flickr account, whatever, all sorts of folk are publishing online like never before.

And this is great. Except, of course, for one thing.

None of these buggers know how to link.

Let’s get the sermon out of the way. The World Wide Web, which most of you know of as “the internet”, was originally conceived as a mass of documents, or pages, linked together. So if, in the middle of one page, you wanted to refer your reader to a different page you’d simply insert a link. They’d click on that and, boom, we’re hypertextualising our tits off.

Those who came into this game relatively early (ie over two years ago) were forced to learn “a little HTML” which in fact means the vast majority of HTML as there isn’t really a lot to it. Those who came in later didn’t have to bother because suddenly every service for publishing online came with a row of buttons like this:

There’s a nice evolution going on here. Whereas HTML is similar to early word processors like Wordperfect where you’d surround words with “codes” to make them bold or underlined, these buttons emulated the point-and-click environments of Word. Want something in bold? Highlight it and click on the B. Want a link? Highlight it, click the chain icon and paste in the URL.

This is all well and good when you have a toolbar but when that toolbar isn’t there, or if it isn’t supported by the browser, then a gaping hole in the learning curve is revealed.

So, for those of you who don’t ever think to link, or who think linking is really hard, here is the lesson.

Firstly, linking is really important. Without links the internet wouldn’t exist. Also, without links your online presence looses a hell of a lot of value. Say you’re a band on MySpace and you have a song or photos or something of interest to your fans elsewhere on the web. It’s in your interest to get people over there as easily as possible and the easiest way is with a link.

Secondly, linking is really easy. Have a look at this HTML code:

<a href=”http://www.more.com”>Click here for more</a>

which produces this:

Click here for more

Now, go back and have a proper look. Don’t just glance at it, see a load of nonsense and assume you’ll never understand it. Try and figure it out. It’s really simple. If you can make a cup of tea you can use HTML to link. Trust me.

The bits within the angle brackets are “tags”. The first is an opening tag and the second, with the /, is a closing tag. Everything within these two is affected by the tag, in this case turned into a link. Here’s what the rest means:

a: anchor, as in “anchor this text to something”. The first a says “start anchoring”. The second a with the slash means “stop”.

href: hypertext reference, or in English, a website address.

http://www.more.com: this is the website address. It must have the http:// bit at the front. The easiest way to make sure you get this right is to load the page in your browser and copy it from there. That way you know it’s right.

“ quote marks are important. As is the =.

And that’s it.

Now get linking.