SaabsUnited.com

From my WordPress dashboard today…..

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“100%Saab” was the one who brought us to this magical all-9′s comment milestone (thanks!), which in some Saaby way feels every bit as important than the one that came after it…..

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Thanks to “74Stingray” for providing the first 6-figure comment here at SU.

It’s nice to see two regulars here fill in some important milestones. I feel like I should get a set of steak knives for both of you

Thanks all for your ongoing contributions to the life of Saabs United.

A few weeks ago, I added some functionality to comments whereby people could make comments bold, with italics and even add a link to their comments if needed.

I’ve noticed, however, that people are having problems with the linking function from time to time, so I thought a quick how-to might be useful.

Many of you would be familiar with making things bold or italic through your use of word processors – you select the text you want to highlight and then press the bold or italic button to apply the formatting to the text you’ve selected.

Linking follows a very similar routine.

Step 1 – Write your text

In this instance, I’ve written “This is the Saabs United linking demo” into the comments field.

Step 2 – Select the text you’d like to apply the link to

This is the step that people are missing out on. For this example, I want to make “Saabs United” the piece of text that’s used to link to somewhere. In this example I’ll link it to the site’s homepage.

So what I have to do now is use my mouse to select “Saabs United”, which is where the link will attach to.

Step 3 – Enter the URL you want to link to

Once the text has been selected, you press the “link” button on the comment form and it’ll bring up a dialogue box. In that dialogue box, you enter the URL you’d like to link to. Remember that it has to start with http:// or it won’t work (tip – copy and paste the URL from the address bar on your browser).

Once you’ve entered the URL, press OK on the dialogue box.

The monkeys behind the scenes will apply the appropriate code your comment so that it shows up as a link.

Here’s my comment with the code applied.

Step 4 – Finish your comment and admire your new found geekiness

Once you’ve finished your comment, done your linking and applied any other formatting (quotes, italics, bold), you can click “submit” and your comment will appear on site – properly formatted and with the link appearing according to the text you selected.

You’ll look like a pro and the comments section won’t have any hellishly long links appearing in their raw form – they look hideous.

Beware

OK, so now you know how to link. My advice is to use it sparingly, however.

If you enter too many links into one comment (like, more than one) there’s a very high chance that the system will think you’re trying to spam the comments section. If that happens, your comment may go into a queue for moderation, or even worse, into the spam filter itself.

I clean out the spam filter everyday so there’s a good chance I’ll catch it, but some days there are too many there to observe every one of them.

Bottom line – use linking appropriately and everything should work Ok.