ConwayLife.com

I'm not a strong HTML guy, but I've seen many posts that include a link to a previous post.
Is there a convenient method for setting up such a link?
triller

You can set up a link to pretty much anywhere by using [ url ] and [ /url ]tags, without the spaces and placing the URL in between them. You can also disguise links by placing the following:

gmc_nxtman wrote:You can set up a link to pretty much anywhere by using [ url ] and [ /url ]tags, without the spaces and placing the URL in between them. You can also disguise links by placing the following:

Code: Select all

[url=example.com]Linkdisguise[/url]

I'm guessing it would be helpful to be able to determine the URL of a specific post within a specific thread (within a specific forum page?).
triller

The url holds all that information in one-letter variables. To get f (forum page), t (thread), and p (post), just navigate there and observe what is being set. To have the page scroll to a specified post automatically, use the syntax #p(postnumber) at the end of the url. For example, if I really wanted to link someone to a post from the middle of the Waterbear construction effort I would search for the thread, observe the assignments (2, 1142, 14826), and type this

Verbatim:

biggiemac wrote:...and type this

Verbatim:

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[url=http://www.conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1142&p=14826#p14826]this[/url]

Now THAT is what I call specific.
Tanx biggiemac!
triller

triller wrote:I'm guessing it would be helpful to be able to determine the URL of a specific post within a specific thread (within a specific forum page?).

That all happens more or less automatically. Just click on the title line of the post you want to link to and the browser will scroll to that post. Then copy the resulting URL out of the browser and paste it into the BBCode url tag, as previous posters have described.

A useful trick is that if you hit "Quote" to reply to another forum message -- even if you don't actually intend to post a response -- you'll see all the text from that posting, including the text of any BBCode tags. Then you can borrow whatever syntax you want. There are some BBCode tags that aren't advertised in the bar at the top of the Reply window, but they work fine -- e.g. size=150 and color=green. BBcode tags are quite different from HTML tags, actually -- square brackets instead of angle brackets, "url" instead of "a href", etc. It's much closer to Wikipedia markup syntax, but there's not a whole lot of overlap even there.

EDIT: While I'm on the subject, a similar hash-mark-means-named-section trick exists for the LifeWiki -- and everywhere else on the Web with multi-section documents, for that matter. For example, even if there isn't a separate link anywhere on the Pufferfish page specifically for that page's Synthesis section, you can still create the URL to jump directly to that section:

http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/Pufferfish#Synthesis

More good stuff!
Tanx Dave.
triller