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Relentless negativity is not a sign that you are more realistic.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Republicans don’t trust women.

This blog will pay for itself.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

We still have time to mess this up!

Democracy cannot function without a free press.

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If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

I like political parties that aren’t owned by foreign adversaries.

There are a lot more evil idiots than evil geniuses.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Cancel the cowardly WaPo and set up an equivalent monthly donation to ProPublica.

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Let me file that under fuck it.

The revolution will be supervised.

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How To Embed Links, a Refresher Course (aka Why do you people suck so hard at simple html?)

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What follows was originally posted a month back, but you all need a refresher course. If you want to put links in the comments section of a post, and I encourage you to do so should you have relevant information to add, please make sure you follow the procedure detailed below.

*************************

One of my pet peeves is when you all put hyperlinks in the comments section, but do not embed them. Sometimes, this is not a problem, but other times, the link is so long that it can, in essence, break the comments section for some users. Since I wanted to play around with screen captures and Photoshop, I figured I would make this quick tutorial for you, which appears below the fold. If you do not know how to embed your hyperlinks, please check it out.

The following is what your hyperlinks in the comments section SHOULD look like:


Good patriots embed their links so that loose urls do not get in the hands of the terrorists.

The following (with the names blurred to protect the guilty) is what it should NOT look like:


Clearly, this commenter is working with the terrorists.

While that link is not quite long enough to “break” the comments section, you get the idea. We want the links embedded, much as they appear EVERYWHERE ELSE ON THE INTERTRON. In fact, the comments even have a handy tool to do just that with relative ease.

Below is a “virgin” comment box. As it is, there is just the box for you to type your comment, and nothing else. However, if you will notice, there appears to be a cryptic button in the upper left corner of the comment box with a RED ARROW pointing to it.


*** CAUTION *** This is just a simulation. Red arrow is not present in actual comment boxes.

Click on that button, and you will see the following:


Do the wonders of the intertron ever cease? Clicking on that button made a bunch more buttons magically appear.

As you can see, there are now a number of formatting options available to you in your comment box. Time to start entering our comment.


You can actually write anything you want there, but I wanted to display my allegiance to the fifth column folks at NPR.

Once your comment is entered, highlight it.


Yawn.

Once you have your comment highlighted, as illustrated above, look at the bar filled with formatting options and click on the “Link” button.


True patriots click when they are told.

Once you have clicked on the link button with your text highlighted, a window will appear. This does not always look the same in every browser, but they are remarkably similar. Here is what it looks like in Firefox.


I wonder if that ‘http://’ is a hint?

In the area provided for you to enter text, enter the url of the hyperlink you wish to share with all of us.


Cut and paste your link here, foolio. Or just type it in manually, if you so desire.

Once you have done that, click ok. As you will soon observe, your comment now appears to have a bunch of formatting. Don’t panic. That is a good thing. It should look like this:


ZOMG look at all that hypertechnical formatting! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.

Once you are done with your comment, click on “Submit Comment” and you should then see the following, complete with a perfectly embedded hyperlink.


As the cheese eating surrender monkeys would say, “VOILA!”

See! That wasn’t too hard. Be a good Bundes, use your training, and embed your links.

Or the terrorists win.

Reader Interactions

86Comments

  1. 1.

    Krista

    One tip, is that if you’re just copying and pasting the whole link, after you paste the link in the box, don’t forget to make sure you don’t have two http headers in there (the pre-filled one, and the one you just pasted in there). I’ve forgotten to get rid of the second one at times, and it effs up your link.

    So it shouldn’t look like this:

    http://https://balloon-juice.com

    (Yes, I know I didn’t embed that link, but it was for demonstrative purposes.)

  2. 2.

    Davebo

    Embedded links are just propaganda tools for the military industrial complex.

    YOU CAN’T TRUST ANYTHING AN EMBEDDED LINK SAYS!

    Much safer to listen to independant minded links who aren’t tied to the dreaded MIC.

  3. 3.

    Horselover Fat

    I just discovered you need to enable javascript to get that little button thingy at the upper left, also the preview button.

  4. 4.

    Robert Johnston

    I’ve noticed that, in the preview at least, embedding more than one link in a comment can cause things to go all higgledy-piggledy. This is a test post. It should a link to espn, a link to this page, and then a link to the front page of this site. The second link doesn’t appear in the preview. I’ve avoided embedding more than one link per comment in the past because of this.

    embedded link one

    embedded link two

    embedded link three

  6. 6.

    myiq2xu

    Is there a button we can push that would allow us to reach across the intertubes and through the monitor of a violator and slap them in the face with a dead fish?

    If it requires a premium subsciption I’ll pay the extra

  8. 8.

    montysano

    Another tip: Tiny URL is your friend. Even using the Link feature above, there’s always a chance that, when pasting a long url, something will go amiss. Tiny URL will take a long url, make it quite small, and let you preview it to make sure it works.

  12. 12.

    gypsy howell

    Oh sure, like we’re going to REMEMBER all that.

    Perhaps you can provide a permanent link to this post on the sidebar. y’know — “Balloon Juice for Terrorists Dummies.”

  13. 13.

    srv

    Seriously, in all of WordPress, there isn’t an option to have the magic button expanded by default?

    There’s obviously a cookie setting, as once expanded under a new ID, it remains that way.

  19. 19.

    UnkyT

    A good commie-troop-hating-libral-nanny state-socialist blogger would have some scripting that would recognize a long url and embed it for us.

  23. 23.

    F. Frederson

    I like unembedded links. I never pass up an opportunity to excercise my left-right scrolling abilities, and a block of text is much easier to read when to runs off the side of the screen.

  27. 27.

    SpotWeld

    Um. In the interest of having this info available for future reference perhaps you can put a little (FAQ or How to Post) link up there on ther right below your man with megaphone clip art?

  28. 28.

    LiberalTarian

    Praise the Lord and pass the hot sauce! I never clicked on that stupid little arrow thingy and all this time I’ve been typing out the code long hand (and crappy at that, cuz I didn’t know the commands and therefore had to go to an HTML class, and then I got in trouble for chewing gum, and my parents were called to the principal’s office, and the whole experience left a significant scar). Man.

    But, when you do a link, and before you close it, what is the purpose of rel=”nofollow”? Embedding the link seems to work regardless of whether this phrase is there or not. This is what you get for not pushing all the buttons–you end up finding the code you want and cutting/pasting in the new stuff over the old without any real idea of how it works.

  30. 30.

    Krista

    TheFountainHead Says:

    Go post this at RedState. I hear they could use some instruction on the intartubez.

    Heh.

    And Andrew, they haven’t been promoting it much on cheezburger, but there’s a similar site for all who want to see cute and captioned photos of the wee wooflets.

    I get a kick out of this one.

  31. 31.

    Kathy

    OMG! You have my gratitude forever! If I were a hot babe I would totally offer to bear your children! A million thanks!

  34. 34.

    Michael D.

    If this was a winger blog, John would first have to explain Cut & Paste.

    No. He would have to raise $25,000 to create a course on how to do it.

  35. 35.

    Jamey

    Michael/Tim: Mouse over link embed. The URL will appear on the footer of your browser frame.

    Tim: Surprised you didn’t know that.

    Michael: Your stupidity isn’t just annoying; it’s a force of nature.

  36. 36.

    Cyrus

    We can use the button above the comment text box? Huh. All this time I’ve been typing in the “a href” stuff manually and copy-pasting the link into it.

    As long as you’re giving basic tips, can you update this post to include a reminder on how to show the less-than and greater-than signs that the blog’s software reads as HTML markup? I know it’s something to do with ampersands, but I can’t remember exactly. It would be helpful when I try to, for example, type the last sentence of the previous paragraph. And the preview thing sucks, I know that, because it often shows something different from what you actually get in the comment.

  38. 38.

    crack

    I never click a link unless I can read the destination

    Ditto. Never.

    I only do it on PCs that have sinned. Tiny URL is a friend to the lazy and corrupt.

  39. 39.

    Punchy

    If this was a winger blog, John would first have to explain Cut & Paste

    If it were Ben Domenech’s blog, he’d need to explain the Copy function.

  40. 40.

    RSA

    I’ve avoided embedding more than one link per comment in the past because of this.

    I’ve avoided embedding more than one link per comment because on the couple of occasions that I have put in a lot of links, the post has been held for moderation. (It could be coincidence, but I’m assuming it’s for protection against spam.) And yes, Preview appears to be broken for some browsers, for some URLs.

    But, when you do a link, and before you close it, what is the purpose of rel=”nofollow”?

    That’s a search engine thingy you can ignore.

  41. 41.

    crack

    Michael/Tim: Mouse over link embed. The URL will appear on the footer of your browser frame.

    Good point, now i know i’m going to http://tinyurl.com/33do7h which obviously is a completely legit site, and definitely not Lemonparty meets 2 girls 1 cup.

  42. 42.

    Dissenter

    I’m surprised no-one else has said this: there are good reasons to not embed links. As someone who researches blogs, unembedded links are much more useful in printouts.

  43. 43.

    Bubblegum Tate

    If this was a winger blog, John would first have to explain Cut & Paste.

    Over at my favorite winger blog, blogsforvictory (nee blogsforbush), “Cut & Paste” is a pejorative term used against all those damn liberals who tend to cut out quotes, facts, figures, etc. from external sources in order to support their arguments, then paste them into B4V comments, thereby sending the wingnuts into a berzerker fury of diagnosing various derangement syndromes and calling people gay.

  44. 44.

    Tsulagi

    I get a kick out of this one.

    Why do Canadians hate chihuahuas? That one was good.

    OMG! You have my gratitude forever! If I were a hot babe I would totally offer to bear your children! A million thanks!

    Wow, if that’s all it takes, you must already be pretty busy.

  48. 48.

    Tim F.

    Michael/Tim: Mouse over link embed. The URL will appear on the footer of your browser frame.

    Try that with tinyurl and let me know how it works.

  50. 50.

    LiberalTarian

    And there is a dictionary! Fabulous! oh, that’s how it’s done

    All this time I intentionally avoiding html coding. The aversion seems kinda unnecessary in retrospect.

  52. 52.

    canuckistani

    Hanging around on slashdot and ending up at goatse once too often taught me never to click on a tiny URL. Even if I’m promised Nigerian millions to do so.

  57. 57.

    EL

    I have tried using the link function in the past, and I broke the comments section. Is there a problem with the function for Macs that are running early versions of OS X?

    (Don’t throw that dead fish, I gave up using the button and started manually embedding the links.)

  59. 59.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    I don’t seem to have a hola fruta tag in my row of formatting buttons. Please fix.

  60. 60.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    If this was a winger blog, John would first have to explain Cut & Paste.

    No. He would have to raise $25,000 to create a course on how to do it.

    No. He would have to successfully accuse the communists of keeping the secrets of the right-mouse button and ctrl-c and ctrl-v to themselves.

    Without that, no money would come in from the masses.

  61. 61.

    Billy K

    Is there a problem with the function for Macs that are running early versions of OS X?

    There’s a problem for all Macs running OS X pre-Tiger.

  62. 62.

    Michael D.

    Michael: Your stupidity isn’t just annoying; it’s a force of nature.

    Jamey: You did read my comment right? What, no apologies? Stupidity. Force of Nature. Pot. Kettle.

  64. 64.

    tBone

    What follows was originally posted a month back, but you all need a refresher course.

    One of my pet peeves is when you all put hyperlinks in the comments section, but do not embed them.

    There’s my pet peeve. I don’t need a refresher course, and I always embed my links, so quit with the “you all”s. I am a unique and beautiful snowflake, damn it!

  65. 65.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    Caidence (fmr. Chris) Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    No it isn’t. I never click a link unless I can read the destination.

    [post redacted for quote]

    You’re withholding my beautiful revelation on TinyURL and the preview. domain? The simple truth that displays TinyURL’s benevolent nature?

    Blasphemy!

  66. 66.

    Andrei

    The point of using TinyURL is for when you can’t embed links, so points deducted from Michael and Tim for that one. People shouldn’t be using TinyURL if they can embed links with anchor tags. TinyURL is for when you can’t and email.

    Also, you should do what a lot of other sites do. Add a link that says “How to embed links” near the comment field with a link to this tutorial.

    Finally, a better design of your website would probably fx this problem entirely for you.

  67. 67.

    Michael D.

    so points deducted from Michael and Tim for that one.

    Andrei: The point is not about TinyURL’s function. You just don’t know where the link goes until after you click it. I could give you a TinyURL that goes directly to porn, and you wouldn’t know until you got there. Not a good thing, especially if you are at work. When you put your mouse over a TinyURL link, you see TinyURL.com and don’t know where it’s taking you. You just have to trust the author.

  68. 68.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    You just don’t know where the link goes until after you click it. I could give you a TinyURL that goes directly to porn, and you wouldn’t know until you got there. Not a good thing, especially if you are at work. When you put your mouse over a TinyURL link, you see TinyURL.com and don’t know where it’s taking you. You just have to trust the author.

    I posted on this, and my post got eaten, perhaps for a reason of filters.

    Putting preview. before tinyurl will display the link’s contents for you. This issue was handled forever ago.

    Read. Acknowledge. Move-on.

    Points deducted for those that said “mouse-over the link”, and then whacked the hosts. You guys failed so hard.

    So hard.

  69. 69.

    Andrei

    Yeah Mike… I got it. The point I was making is that people shouldn’t use TinyURLs with embedded links. There’s no reason to. And if they do, as Chris mentioned they can make it such it still works properly.

    But basically make sure in B-J’s tutorial to tell people to stop using TinyURL as well.

    Ok… moving on to more important things than teaching you about Netiquette.

  70. 70.

    Alex

    TinyURL does let you register for “preview” usage (for which you need to allow cookies). If you have the TinyURL preview cookie set (go to tinyurl.com and click on “Preview Feature”), then clicking on a tinyurl link takes you to an intermediate page with the full link in plain text so you can see it before going there.

    This feature is not available at evilurl.com, but it’s more fun than TinyURL since you get links like http://evilurl.com/nadsSMUTTYanal – the link to this page.

  71. 71.

    Tim F.

    None of you have disproved the point that tinyurl is an unnecessary pain in the ass. I am not typing some accessory text or going to an intermediate page just to see where a link goes. Embed your links.

  72. 72.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    None of you have disproved the point that tinyurl is an unnecessary pain in the ass. I am not typing some accessory text or going to an intermediate page just to see where a link goes. Embed your links.

    That’s true, but that wasn’t your initial objection :)

    You said you couldn’t see where it goes. You can see if you want to.

    Besides, the point of TinyURL is to deal with HUUUUUGE URLs possible limits to the compatibility issues of clipboard buffers, textbox buffers, and formatting. Usually this is a problem with instant messaging, but not exclusively. So don’t be whacking/banning it wholesale. It has its place.

  74. 74.

    Tim F.

    So don’t be whacking/banning it wholesale. It has its place.

    If I banned tinyurl, it wouldn’t exactly stop you from IMing with it, now would it? Good idea tho. Maybe I will.

  76. 76.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    Good idea tho. Maybe I will.

    /me sits up in seat
    /me prepares to say something
    /me catches self, ponders
    /me leans back, discards objection.

    So be it. It’s other people’s problem now; I know what I’m doing.

  78. 78.

    Caidence (fmr. Chris)

    I’m sorry, John. Neither my desktop nor my laptop think too much of your procedure.

    Delia, your javascript is probably off, probably from an overactive security policy. Either a.) tell your computers to take a couple of benzos, go into the browser settings and scale-back your security to something more friendly.

    or b.) You might be able to go into your browser settings and list balloon-juice.com as an exception to the security rules applied.

  80. 80.

    UnkyT

    Jesus, I used to think the people here were somewhat intelligent! Its embedding a link, not curing cancer. If you have javascript off or for some other reason can’t use the link button you can learn one line of html

    <a href=”PUT YOUR LINK HERE”>Put a name here&lt\a>

  82. 82.

    Harley

    Just testing. But worth a read:

    Seeing the name Hillary in a headline last week—a headline about a life that had involved real achievement—I felt a mouse stirring in the attic of my memory. Eventually, I was able to recall how the two Hillarys had once been mentionable in the same breath. On a first-lady goodwill tour of Asia in April 1995—the kind of banal trip that she now claims as part of her foreign-policy “experience”—Mrs. Clinton had been in Nepal and been briefly introduced to the late Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest. Ever ready to milk the moment, she announced that her mother had actually named her for this famous and intrepid explorer. The claim “worked” well enough to be repeated at other stops and even showed up in Bill Clinton’s memoirs almost a decade later, as one more instance of the gutsy tradition that undergirds the junior senator from New York.

    Cuz, you know. He didn’t climb Everest and garner all that fame until, oh, five years after she was born.

  83. 83.

    UnkyT

    None of you have disproved the point that tinyurl is an unnecessary pain in the ass. I am not typing some accessory text or going to an intermediate page just to see where a link goes. Embed your links.

    Or that if you cant handle embedding your links you will for some reason be able to do the tinyurl thing.

  84. 84.

    myiq2xu

    Or that if you cant handle embedding your links you will for some reason be able to do the tinyurl thing.

    Is it just me or did that sound kinda dirty?

  85. 85.

    MobiusKlein

    “(aka Why do you people suck so hard at simple html?)”

    Et Tu, Brutus.

    Why does John Cole suck at validating his CSS?
    you need to use ‘px’ in specifing padding
    ie ‘padding: 4px;’ rather than ‘padding: 4’

    ‘border-style: dash;’ does not exist – try dashed.

    that is all

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