Links

The simplest way to create a link is to surround the url (which should start with http://) with square brackets.  For example, [http://google.com] will make a link like this: http://google.com.

You can further specify the text of the link (as wel as other options) by using the long format: [link url 'link text']. As you might guess the 'url' should be replaced by the actual url you'd like the link to point to, and whatever appears between the single quotes as 'link text' will be the text people actually click on. The variants [rightlink url 'link text'] and [link url 'link text' new] create links that are right justified and links that will open in a new window (which you should almost never do).

The w3c provides some useful guidelines for writing effective link text.

While creating links to outside sites is (hopefully) unambiguous; e.g. [link http://google.com 'link to google'], there are choices to be made if you're linking to other pages within SERC hosted websites. Here are some guidelines:

1. When linking between pages in the same module (whose urls only differ after the last /) just use the last bit of the url of the targeted page: [link page2.html 'link to page 2']
2. When linking to an existing page that's on the SERC server but part of a separate project, build the link from the 'server root' starting with the left-most '/': [link /introgeo/models/index.html 'Starting Point Models']
3. When linking to a page within the same project you might want to link to the development version of the page: [link /dev/introgeo/models/index.html 'Starting Point Models']. Presumably if you're working on a dev page it makes more sense for your links to point to the other dev pages, rather than the live ones so you can test drive the dev site and really see how all the links will work. Happily when you make a page live all links will automatically have /dev removed so that your live page links will point to their live counterparts.
4. You can link to locations within a specific page using an anchor syntax (familiar to those html aficionados among you): [link #midpage 'Jump to mid-page']. This is dependent on the existence of an anchor with appropriate name being added to the appropriate point on the page. In this case [anchor 'midpage'] would do the trick. In addition to linking to locations in the current page, you can point to (previously marked) locations on other pages by adding a # followed by the name of the anchor to the end of the normal link url for that page.
5. Avoid using the entire address for links to SERC pages: [link http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/models/index.html 'Starting Point Models']. While it will work it's unnecessary and can lead to some confusion (for reasons we won't get into here). Use the format in bullet 2 above.