Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

This year has been the longest three days of putin’s life.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Giving in to doom is how we fail to fight for ourselves & one another.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

The low info voters probably won’t even notice or remember by their next lap around the goldfish bowl.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.

The real work of an opposition party is to oppose.

Our messy unity will be our strength.

You are here: Home / z-Retired Categories / Previous Site Maintenance / I Only Do This Because I Love You

I Only Do This Because I Love You

by | 80 Comments

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You people flat out suck at embedding links in the comments. Read this. I hate you.

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

80Comments

  1. 1.

    Just Some Fuckhead

    I don’t like to brag but I just type in the straight HTML code instead of using your ID10T tools. :)

  4. 4.

    ImJohnGalt

    Below is a “virgin” comment box

    One of the 72 you will find in the jihadist heaven Barack Obama is planning for you.

  5. 5.

    LanceThruster

    THX. For those of us technically illiterate and too dumb/embarrassed to ask, your tutorial is appreciated. Not that *I* needed such a thing (furiously scribbles notes…)

  11. 11.

    ImJohnGalt

    I’m picturing you with a PBR in your hand wearing a wife-beater while you typed this post, John.

    By the way, I’ll be watching your Stillers play a pre-season game up here in Toronto this summer, right around my birthday.

  14. 14.

    lojasmo

    I was going to register simply to ‘break’ this thread. Please don’t ban me.

  17. 17.

    Joshua Norton

    Dood! We don’ need no steenking buttons. REAL men type their own HTML out long hand. Now how do I get my Gravatar to show up?

  20. 20.

    BP

    Look at it this way. You may have a few people who “break” the comments section, but at least those who comment here don’t see a “virgin” comment box and shout:

    Hey! Dere’s no words dere! Fuckin’ thing, sucks!

    The absence of words has been known to enrage some people.

  24. 24.

    nightjar

    One way to practice embedding links and other stuff is to sign up for a blog at blogger.com. You don’t have to use it for blogging, just practice comment formatting, and when you’ve got the embed thing down just delete the blog.

  25. 25.

    Darkness

    John, your blog software is what needs fixing. Other blogs don’t let themselves get broken in the manner you discuss. When a long url shows up, the software automagically shortens it to a suitable length, leaving the front intact and the end reduced to …blah.html

    I find this preferable to hidden links like you are demanding, since with the others a hover is not required to see where you’re going to end up.

    But whatever. Your blog. Your kingdom. But I find that technology is much easier to change than people and if it bothers you so, that’s probably the better route to a stress-free solution.

  26. 26.

    The Moar You Know

    One of my many hats as a software developer is usability analysis. So I’d like to give you, Mr. Cole, some free advice that would normally cost somebody a fair amount of money-

    PROTIP: Do away with the “cryptic button”, probably better referred to as a “formatting tool expansion” button. Get rid of it! Just have all the formatting buttons sitting there when some idiot fine upstanding commenter comes along to spew teh stupid liek a frat boy sprays puke bless us all with their gifts, pearls if you will, of wisdom.

    My browser is kind enough to remember to leave them expanded for me, but not all browsers are created equal. And this way one of the hordes of great unwashed lusers posting here might just see that “link” button, and at least ask themselves what it’s for before posting an over 9000 character-long URL that busts the page out to three or four monitor widths.

    Users are retards. Code accordingly.

  27. 27.

    folkbum

    REAL men type their own HTML out long hand.

    Type? Crap. That must be why mine never comes out right. I’ve been scribbling it in crayon on my LCD screen.

    Anyone got some alcohol I can use to wipe this stuff off?

  28. 28.

    BP

    At the risk of getting ahead of the class, I thought I might try the Strong Strike button.

    Success!

    From now on, confident that I won’t be breaking any comment boxes, I’m doin’ it live!

  30. 30.

    The Moar You Know

    “Users are retards”

    See, I’m living proof. My first double-post, but assuredly not my last.

  31. 31.

    Joshua Norton

    My first double-post

    Awww. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and thought you were being darkly ironic.

  33. 33.

    John O

    ImJohnGalt,

    Not sure if that was satirical or not, but I love your handle.

    Anyway, I’ve never worn a wife beater, don’t remember ever drinking a PBR (though I may have forgotten from puking too many of them in HS), and am a Chicago Bear fan and Chicago Cubs fan and Chicago every-sport fan. Even the damn White Sox. My baseball dream is a Cubs-White Sox World Series that goes 7, the last one in Wrigley, of course, and Game 7 being around 10-0 Cubs.

    Play on, said the referee. Picture what you will.

  34. 34.

    John O

    Uh, ImJohnGalt, were you mixing your John’s in consecutive posts?

    It’s a pretty common name. No biggie. I just didn’t get it.

  35. 35.

    stickler

    Darkness opines:

    But I find that technology is much easier to change than people…

    Maybe so, but the power of engineering and stubbornness is something to behold. Like, for example, while watching 80% of the American population trying to re-set the clock on the VCR. The Japanese had us doing that for about 25 years, and it never took. They must have been laughing their asses off in Tokyo.

  36. 36.

    ImJohnGalt

    John O, my apologies.

    My first post addressing you was making reference to the fact that the link you posted was incorrect broken, and I added a corrected link to what I am assuming is a post at your blog.

    My second post was to the proprietor of this blog, based on the title of the post. My reference to the Pittsburgh football team was the result of said proprietor’s fanatacism for said team.

    That said, I wonder if Steely McBeam is going to make the trip to Toronto? I’ll bet Customs doesn’t let him in.

  37. 37.

    John O

    ImJG,

    No apologies necessary. One thing I’ve learned out here in Blogoland is that unless you’re a very, very good writer, and even if you are, you’re going to be misunderstood. Thick skin seems pretty much a requirement.

    And I sincerely thank you for fixing my link. It’s just a stupid rant, anyway, but it came from the heart. LOL.

  40. 40.

    John O

    OK, it works, but just for the record, Mr. Cole, the preview did not show the link. The “broken” one that ImJG fixed did.

    So there.

  43. 43.

    LiberalTarian

    Oh, John, I feel so, so, submissive when you abuse me. Oh. Oh. Oh. You big stong man.

    ;)

  45. 45.

    Martin

    Just for the record… It’s not that we’re stupid. It’s that sometimes we’re racing to get the comment in before your sit goes tits up after a post.

  47. 47.

    Caravelle

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

    Oh, very good ! But I prefer the red-blooded American “VIOLA !”. It’s so cute.

  48. 48.

    SGEW

    Not to be too much of th’ noob here, but what about embedding (yes, embedding, not imbedding . . . I have learnt mine lesson, and have abandoned archaic British spelling) links that no workee?

    See, e.g.,

    http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23933

    (a link I posted the other day . . . short enough not to “break” nothin’, I hope)

    It won’t embed (at least, it won’t in preview) and if I do, no text appears after it.

    For demonstration purposes:
    Attempted link.

  52. 52.

    PeterJ

    Oh, look at that. It embedded.

    I guess it’s just a problem w/ the preview. Huh.

    The link ends with a number, in some browsers that’s an issue. Add a letter to the end of the link and the problem with the preview goes away. Obviously the letter should be removed before posting…

  53. 53.

    Fred X. Quimby

    Truth is… your blog software sucks ass for not being able to handle long unembedded links automatically. Funny thing… these cawputerz we got here were s’posed to make our lives easier…

  56. 56.

    passerby

    LanceThruster Says:

    THX. For those of us technically illiterate and too dumb/embarrassed to ask, your tutorial is appreciated. Not that I needed such a thing (furiously scribbles notes…)

    What Lance said, and masterfully done.

    Here goes…

    Meanwhile, breaking news from the backwater, Gov. Jindal is vewy,vewy mad…

    “I strongly disagree with this pay increase,” Jindal said through spokeswoman Melissa Sellers. “They are a separate branch of government and must manage their own internal affairs.”

    “He takes a position of no position and has agreed not to veto it,”

    uh huh, yeah.

    T

  57. 57.

    Jay C

    Maybe it’s just a matter of which lame retarded assbackwards broswer you’re using: In The Fabulous Firefox, I see all the little formatting buttons anyway.

    Or maybe it’s been set to default that way: dunno: embedding a link is about the limit of my internet skillz – me not being as smart as all that John Cole and all…

  58. 58.

    passerby

    Testing 1,2,3…

    I would like my comments to come across stronger without appearing to be a bully know-it-all.

    Sometimes I emphasize with CAPS instead of italics cuz I don’t know how else to do it, but, it comes across as batshit crazy emotionally overwrought, so, I’ll practice now while I’m wearing my tinfoil hat thinking cap.

    T

  60. 60.

    crack

    John,

    When you do these posts please mention that tinyurl bite donkey balls and should not be used as an alternative. If you don’t idiots bring it up.

    Tinyurl just God’s way of keeping rick rolling easy for the masses. It lets you send people to goatse and lemonparty. It is not meant for serious use.

  61. 61.

    D-Chance.

    Bah, it’s more fun watching Yglesias fuck up his own blog via Chronic Open Tag Syndrome (COTS). Hardly a fortnight passes that he doesn’t have a thread hi-jacked by the “Damn you, Matt, close your tags!” nazis… :)

  62. 62.

    Tim F.

    The cure for long URLs

    No, tinyurl is shit. I will never click a link if I don’t know the destination. You shouldn’t either.

  65. 65.

    Tom Hilton

    I don’t like to brag but I just type in the straight HTML code instead of using your ID10T tools.

    I would strongly urge everyone to just learn the damn html. It ain’t rocket science, folks, and it comes in very handy in situations (*cough*haloscan*cough*) where this kind of no-brainer formatting isn’t available.

  66. 66.

    RSA

    Users are retards. Code accordingly.

    No true usability person would say such a thing. (But it is a reasonable approximation for software people, who generally think everyone in the world should be just like them.)

    (All HTML in this comment was typed by hand. No animals were harmed in the process.)

  67. 67.

    SGEW

    The link ends with a number, in some browsers that’s an issue. Add a letter to the end of the link and the problem with the preview goes away.

    Hmmm.
    test

    Whady’a know. It works! Thanks!

  68. 68.

    Jinxi

    Being a fabulous female, I do all my HTMLing by hand, thank you very much. I need no silly little buttons. I am happy, though, that many on this site are familiar with the blockquote. It makes my heart sing!

    No, tinyurl is shit. I will never click a link if I don’t know the destination. You shouldn’t either.

    I second that. Following blind links is bad Karma. Just say “no”.

  69. 69.

    Cris

    The link ends with a number, in some browsers that’s an issue. Add a letter to the end of the link and the problem with the preview goes away.

    Speaking of programmers shifting the burden onto the user.

    Turns out this is because the AutoPreview function “texturizes” the comment (i.e. changes normal text to fancy-pants Unicode characters). Which itself isn’t necessarily a problem, except the wptexturize function has a stupid off-by-one error that causes it to process the interior of html tags.

    That could be corrected by changing lines 11-14 of /wp-content/plugins/live-comment-preview.php/commentPreview.js from:


    if ( index == prev ) {
    index = text.indexOf('>', prev);
    }
    index++;

    to


    if ( index == prev ) {
    index = text.indexOf('>', prev) + 1;
    if(index == 0) index = length;
    }

    but if John is really truly planning to move away from WordPress, he probably isn’t going to want to twiddle with little nuts and bolts like this.

  70. 70.

    Cris

    oh for fuck’s sake. So much for [code] blocks preserving content. obviously, my javascript above won’t work as it is has been mangled by WordPress.

  72. 72.

    marjowil

    I know I am guilty, but in my frail defense, Scoop on the GOS is easier to use.

    thanks for the tutorial. but probably I just won’t linky anymore.

  74. 74.

    South of I-10

    But I am new and scared. What if it doesn’t work and this happens? I really hope I didn’t screw that up.

  75. 75.

    w vincentz

    I’ll just say that as a guilty one, I’m sorry.
    Now that I know about the “hightlight” thing, I think I can handle this.
    Heck,I’m a guy that once asked a chick if she wanted to see my 3″ floppy. She reacted.
    Took four days for the bruise to subside.

  76. 76.

    Kathy

    I was dying to give this a try but didn’t have a good link until I found this. Not to bring up a sore subject or anything.

    Love,

    Kathy +0 (come on it’s not even 4:00 pm yet-I’m a lush but not that much of a lush)

  77. 77.

    RSA

    Programming makes my head hurt.

    There’s a reason I study the humanities, damn it all.

    If you’re going to use a computer, you have to know something about programming. After all, you wouldn’t get on an airplane not knowing how to fly it or do midair engine repairs, would you?

    Oh, wait. . .

  78. 78.

    Kathy

    Oh crap-I don’t even want to try again because I know I’ll screw it up. Maybe it’s time to offer my tech abilities to the McCain campaign.

    It’s 5:00 somewhere :)

  79. 79.

    Conservatively Liberal

    I am waiting for someone to post a link properly, but using a continuous line text (no spaces) that breaks the page.

    That would be the ‘Balloon Juice’ way of responding to John. ;)

Comments are closed.