how do you link something in the author's note? dumb it down as much as you can, i don't know computers
In order to make a link, you need to use some basic html formatting. Most websites do this html for you through the Rich Text Format that looks kind of like the menu at the top of a google doc.
AO3 has that option, too, but only in the box where you type your fic. All other places where you can write text (summary, author’s notes, comment), you need to use html formatting instead.
To make a link using html format, you need the link itself, the words you want the reader to click on, and you also need the html language that goes around it.
Because html is a markup language that computers read, you need to use certain symbols and syntax to tell the computer which parts are the code and which parts are what you want the person to see on the screen. These symbols and syntax together make up html tags. These are different from the #tags that you see on social media.
Html tags are written inside the triangle brackets on your keyboard. I wish I could type them, but when I try to do that, tumblr reads them as html and makes them disappear from my mobile view. Sigh. I’m going to use | instead of the triangle brackets for the purposes of writing this in a way that makes any sense.
Open a tag like this: |tag|
Close a tag like this: |/tag|
To link something in html, you use the a tag and specify the link you are referencing. You can do that by putting a href=“link.url” inside of those triangle brackets. Your link goes in the middle of the quotation marks. You can just copy/paste it in there from your browser.
|a href=“copy/paste your link here”|
That just opens the link. Then you need to add what you want the link to say (the part that’s underlined that people click on). And after that, you have to close the a tag. What that looks like is:
|a href=“copy/pasted link goes in here”|Text that you want to be clickable and that will look underlined on the page goes here|/a|
I hope that explains it well enough? If you want to try it out (or just see it with the triangle brackets that you need to use), click on this link and edit the a href line with your link and the text you want your readers to see. Then click the Run button. If you click on the link on the right hand side and it works (it will load the page as a preview), you can copy/paste that a href line directly into your author’s note and you know it’ll work.
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