On benefits of hypertext

Inspired by Damien's blog I decided to stress the importance of hypertext in writing one's post. It is something very simple, that can greately enhance the usefulness of your posts (including blog posts), but also something I find too few people do.

When writing a post in any markup language supporting hyperlinks (html or bbc being most common), try to link all important terms to related webpage. Technically, it is quite simple. Many user interfaces, like the one of Blogger I am using just now, have a button that allows you to insert link into highlightened text. The most icon of the button is similar to this:

If the button is not there, don't panic. In html, you can simply use the < a href="http://link/" > text you want to link < /a > syntax (important note: remove the spaces, I have to keep them so the blogger script will not convert it into hypertext), and in bbc, [url=]URL description[/url] will do the trick.

Sometimes off-Wiki webpage may be more relevant (just like when I linked Damien's blog above), but often Wiki is the best place to refer your readers (it has the definition and usually links the best off-Wiki pages, thus being the most informative single link there is).

I found (on my other, older blog, and on many 'net forums) that people like to have the ability to go from my post to relevant Wiki article in one click. Simply put, it saves them time to google for the relevant page. In addition, peoplequite often are willing to click once, but won't bother if they havr to click more and google (being afraid it will take too much time and/or deciding it's not worth the effort). So if you want to make sure your readers know what you are talking about - link the key word to where you want them to go.