Can someone explain a link thing?

[Ginger Herten]

Can someone explain to me like I’m five how to make those links that take you part way down a page, and not to a whole different page? The one’s with a # symbol. I kind of know enough to know I can, but also I don’t actually know how to.

I’d like to have them at the top of my probably next story. It’s really more of an anthology than a plot driven short story. There is a fairly simple plot that strings everything together, but much of the meat of the story is a series of flash backs the main character has over the course of the story, each focused on a side character and plot. The central plot is a little more substantial than in Bradbury’s “Illustrated Man,” but it’s kind of like that.

Anyway, since I’d rather not take up half the main page publishing it in multiple parts, I thought having links to the start of parts would make it more readable, since I assume most won’t want to finish it in a single night, and many might want to revisit favorite parts. I really should do the same thing for some of my other longer stories, like “Cheaper than a condo.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 1 month ago by Ginger Herten.

[f35h]

There’s a tutorial here:

https://wordpress.com/support/page-jumps/

It may look a little different in different versions of wordpress, but hopefully not too much.

Having skimmed it, the process is:

o Add an *anchor* to the paragraph you want to link to (e.g. section-three)
o Type the text at the top that you want to click to go to the paragraph.
o Add a *link* to this text. The *link* is the *anchor* with # in front (so, #section-three)

That’s it, I think.

[Ginger Herten]

Thanks f35h. I’m having a bit of a hard time getting it to work within a story, it seems those instructions are for posts and pages. Or possibly, I’m just being an idiot and misunderstanding. It is helping simply knowing what the damned things are called.

It’s not helping that eacj time I’ve logged in to try to figure it out, I get distracted by one thing or another. Maybe I can figure it out tonight while I have an hour or two before I need to get to bed so I can get up early and deal with stuff I have to do in the morning.

[f35h]

Hi,

Hmm… now I’ve actually tried to do it, those instructions don’t make sense! I think a story is a ‘page’ in their world. But I think the problem is that those instructions are for a newer version of wordpress than we’re running here, as I can’t see any way to add the ‘anchor’.

So, I think you have to do it a bit more manually, by inserting HTML tags.

On the ‘Edit Story’ page, the main text box has two tabs, ‘Visual’ and ‘Text’. If you click on ‘Text’ then you can see (and edit) the HTML. The clickable bits are enclosed in tags, and the places they link to are in <span> </span> tags.

Hope this helps 🙂

Here’s a noddy example, which you can hopefully copy and adapt.:

<a href="#paragraph_one">click here to jump to paragraph one</a>

<a href="#paragraph_two">click here to jump to paragraph two</a>

<span id="paragraph_one"></span>This is paragraph one, "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum."

<span id="paragraph_two"></span>This is paragraph two. Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

[f35h]

Ugh. The forum swallowed some of my explanation. It should have read:

The clickable bits are enclosed in <a> </a> tags, and the places they link to are in <span> </span> tags.

(Also, I don’t know if you can see my draft stories, but if you can, the example above is there, called ‘page jump example’)

[Ginger Herten]

THANK YOU F35H!!!!

I finally got it working on a test story (I just made it private.)

One of the craziest things about trying to get it to work was that I had written the HTML stuff exactly the same as yours, but could not get it to work. I tried tweaking it ten ways to sunday. It was driving me insane. I finally decided to copy and paste from your example (yes, I can see them) into my test story, and I could get your example to work just fine. I kept staring at it trying to figure out why yours worked and mine didn’t, when I noticed that the quotation marks on your example looked different.

I think there’s something about the way when I type quote marks the ipad automatically makes them open/closed (left leaning/right leaning) quote marks instead of the neutral symmetrical ones you had that is the issue.

Anyway, I C&Ped just one of your quote marks into the jump I had written and it did the trick. Now I just wish I could figure out how to just type them instead, C&Ping feels stupid. But hey, if it works, it ain’t stupid.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by Ginger Herten.

[Ginger Herten]

Oh, and it should be ready Friday.

[f35h]

Ah, the dreaded ‘Smart Quotes’. I don’t have an ipad to check, but you should be able to turn them off in settings.

I don’t seem to be able to post links here, but I googled ‘type standard quotes on ipad’ and found an answer pretty quickly.

• This reply was modified 2 years ago by f35h.

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