More for Bloggers

More on Some of Those Top-Row Buttons

Creating Hyper-Links

There are two related “link” buttons in the top tool-bar. They are illustrated at the left. In order to use the one on the far left, something has to be selected, normally text but it could be an image.

Quick Hint: You can select text by clicking the mouse pointer at the beginning of the text you want to select and, without releasing the mouse button, swipe the text (move the mouse pointer to the end of the text). As you swipe the text, the editor applies a temporary visual effect to it so you can see what text you are selecting. Release the mouse pointer when the text you want to select appears “highlighted”.

The Link button, the left-hand button of the two (it looks like three links of a chain), works to turn the selected text into a link. The right-hand button of the two (it looks like the three links of a chain with the middle link broken) removes the link markup from something you previously turned into a link (click anywhere in the link text and then click the UnLink button).

When you click the Link button, a dialog similar to the one at the left will be displayed. You can type the URL of a page on another web site or one on the current web site in the text box beside URL. The text you enter in the text box beside Title will be displayed as a hint when a visitor hovers his cursor of the link.

Quick Hint: Do you remember seeing “Permalink” and a URL just under the title of your post while you were editing it? Well, if you use one of those permalinks as the URL, you will have created a link to your post!

The bottom part of the dialog, under “Or link to existing content” provides shortcuts to pages or posts that WordPress already knows about (in other words, your pages and posts).

The Search box is used for the obvious purpose (the search will be conducted as you type into the text box).

If you change your mind about turning your selected text into a link, click the Cancel link in the bottom left-hand corner of the dialog (or the X button in the top right-hand corner.

When you have entered the requisite link information, click the Add Link button.

More…

If you hover your mouse pointer over the icon shown at the left (well, hover it over the same icon in the editor tool-bar 🙂 ), you will see a hint that says “Insert More Tag”. If you actually click it, you will see horizontal line (a “rule”) with a little box labeled “More…” hanging off the right-hand end as in the following illustration (it will stretch most of the way across the edit pane).

However, that is not what visitors will see when they view your post. So, what is going on and what use is it?

What has happened is the editor has inserted some HTML code into your post. It displays that code as the above horizontal line in the edit pane, but WordPress recognizes that HTML code when it goes to display your post to your viewers and it does something special. If it is displaying your post on your Home page (where it displays all your recent posts), it stops displaying the post when it encounters that “More Tag” and displays a link, “Read the rest of this entry »” instead. Your visitor has to click on that link to see the rest of your post.

Why is that useful? Well think about it. We write posts that require our readers to scroll down once or twice (or even more times) to read the whole article. If you have several such posts being displayed on your home page, your visitor may need to scroll down many times to see what they are. If you use the More Tag, then your visitors essentially see the first few lines of your post (depending on where you inserted the tag) and can perhaps see all the posts without having to scroll down at all (or maybe only having to scroll down once or twice). They can then choose which article to read and just click that “Read the rest of this entry »” link to see it in its entirety.

For the Curious: The actual HTML code for the More Tag is “

”

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