It’s easy. FreeRepublic software automatically makes a hot link when you post the URL. BUT, this only works in a “reply”. It doesn’t make a hot link in the original post, so you have to repeat it down further in a reply.
I don’t consider myself a HTML maven, but I have picked up a few things over my years of FReeping. First, you should know that automatic link creation only occurs when there is no HTML code in your reply.<a href=For example, http://goo.gl/KSMd2H doesn’t automatically produce a link in this reply because I have used HTML to produce those italics in these last two sentences. Also note that because I used HTML for italics, I had to use HTML to create the paragraph break above. All in all, I don’t usually use the auto generation of links because I like to format my posts, and that requires HTML.
When you use HTML to make a link, you can create a more human-friendly label for it instead of the often-times gibberish names for the actual address the computer uses to link to the file you want. The HTML for a link is as follows:
tells the computer that you are creating a link"http://goo.gl/KSMd2H”
tells the computer where to find the file you’re linking to (double quotes required)>
tells the computer to expect the label immediately followingRockwell Automation
tells the computer how you want the link labeled</a>
tells the computer that the link instruction is complete<a href="http://goo.gl/KSMd2H”>Rockwell Automation</a>Note: I had to use a separate coding trick to get the computer to display the code instead of trying to execute it. I will now prune away my commentary, so you can see the HTML code explicitly:
I will now allow the computer to see the code you saw, without that trick which hid the HTML code above:Rockwell Automation
. . . which I tested, and found to work. Obviously when you make a link of your own, you have to use the correct, exact address to the link you wish to direct the reader’s computer to. But you are free to improvise in defining the label you want the reader to see.