It has occurred to me that many people may not understand how to create the hyperlinks (the clickable links) used in the Sciscoop postings. It is really very easy to create a hyperlink to another website; however, it is kind of tricky to illustrate here [in print] because [of something special the computer does whenever it sees a < character or a > character - rickyjames].

Say that I want to post a sentence that has a hyperlink to Slashdot. I would type it as follows into the “submit story” or “post a comment” box:

There is a wonderful article in [a href = "http://slashdot.com"] Slashdot [/a] that describes how easy it is to fix elections using computerized voting machines.

Notice the example sentence above includes the [ and ] characters in several places. In reality, when you actually type that sentence into a story or comment box, you wouldn’t type [ or ] at all; you would use the < and > characters instead. Here is how the sentence appears once it is posted after the [ and ] brackets are replaced by the < and >:

There is a wonderful article in Slashdot that describes how easy it is to fix elections using computerized voting machines.

As you can see, Sciscoop’s preprocessor converts the HTML code into a hypertext link. Hope this encourages people to post their favorite sciscoops.

Update [2003-10-21 13:16:45 by rickyjames]: Also be sure to read janra’s great comment below about another (and even easier) way. The “auto-format” she mentions is in a drop-down menu above the text entry box that has other choices listed as “HTML format” and “plain text”.

Update [2005-8-8 14:59:17 by chad]: Here is an explanation with examples of the actual HTML tags:

The format of a clickable links is like this (where the italic, small-caps text is replaced by what you enter):

<a href=”LinkHere“>ClickableLinkTextHere</a>

so, for example, the following sentence with embedded HTML

I found a <a href=”http://www.sciscoop.com”>great science site</a>.

would be displayed as a sentence with a clickable link:

I found a great science site.

Be careful when entering the URL. It must be preceded by “http://” or else it will not work correctly. So use “http://www.sciscoop.com” instead of “www.sciscoop.com”.