The (Other) End of the Internet

Like a lot of other people, I use Thingamablog 1.06 to maintain this blog. It’s easy and, most importantly, it’s FREE.

I happen to know that in a few days someone who is new to blogging in general (you know who you are) is going to ask me for instruction on how to use this software to create a link. I also know that it is extremely likely that a week or two later, someone else (you know who YOU are, too) is going to ask me the same thing. Rather than explain the process twice, I’m writing this tutorial.

The easiest way to do this is to just type out your blog entry as you normally would and don’t worry about putting in links until later. The only real problem with this method is that you have to keep a separate list of URLs for your links then either make it obvious in the text which one goes where or write that down as well. Either way, this is no major crisis - it just means that you have to think about what you’re about to say and that’s just a good habit to get into anyway.

After you finish saying everything you have to say in your post, here’s where the fun starts. What you need to do is, one link at a time, select the text that will be the link. You can do this either by pointing the mouse cursor at the beginning of the text and holding the left mouse button while dragging the cursor to the end of the text in question or by positioning the insertion point at the beginning of the text and holding the “Shift” key while tapping the right arrow key to move the cursor to the end of the text.

Once the text for your new link is highlighted, go up on the toolbar, right above the text-input area, and click the little button that has a globe with a link in front of it.

This will present you with a dialog box titled “Hyperlink”. At this point, it should be obvious what to do, but I’ll go ahead and spell it out anyway. In the box labeled “URL”, put the URL you want people sent to if they click this link. Note that the “http://” part is filled in for you, so if you do like I do and copy the URL from the location bar of an open web browser then you’ll need to erase that before pasting, otherwise you could end up with something like “http://http://www.google.com”. That would be a Bad Thing™.

The box labeled “Name” can be safely ignored 99.9% of the time. That is used if you want to create a link that goes to somewhere else on the same page. For example, at the beginning of this paragraph, I created a link with the URL box blank and the word “pockets” in the name field. Now, I can create a link here that takes you to the beginning of this paragraph.

The box labeled “Title” is another not-exactly-necessary item. As far as I know, it is essentially a place for you to stick in keywords that search engines can find. Unless someone goes looking at the source code for your blog, no human being will see this.

The text in the field “Text” will already be filled in with the characters you highlighted earlier. This is where you specify what the text to click on should be.

Below all this is a checkbox that says “Open link in” followed by a drop-down box that’s only enabled when the box is checked. Once enabled, it has options for “New Window”, “Same Window”, “Same Frame”. Again, these should be self-explanatory. Note that if you’re using any of Thingamablog’s default templates then your blog doesn’t use frames and you can ignore the “Same Frame” option. I usually select “New Window” because I know that a lot of times I’ll be reading something and want to go check out a link in the article but still be able to get back to the article to finish reading it. I figure most other people must be the same way.

Now you know how to put links into your blog entries, so I expect every blog entry you make for the rest of your life to contain at least three links to http://otherendoftheinter.net. I’ll be watching…

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