View source for Help:Tutorial (External links)

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Wiki-syntax makes it easy to make user-friendly '''external links'''.
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== External links ==
If you want to link to a site outside of Vincentian Encyclopedia, it should almost always go under the "External links" heading at the end of an article.

The easiest way to make a link is to simply type in the full URL for the page you want to link to. If you want to make a link to Google, all you need to do is type:
:<tt>http://www.google.com/</tt>
The wiki will automatically treat this text as a link (as has been done with the URL above) and will display the raw web address, including the "<nowiki>http://</nowiki>" part. In practice, you won't see this format much, as raw URLs are ugly and often give no clue to what the site actually ''is''.

To make the link display something other than the URL, use one square bracket at each end. If you want to make a link to Google, type:
:<tt><nowiki>[http://www.google.com/]</nowiki></tt>
This will display the link as a number in brackets, like this: [http://www.google.com/]. This format is mostly used for citing sources within an article. It looks like a footnote, so it's best to only use it as such (for example, following a direct quote or a statement which requires a source). Avoid this usage: "According to [http://members.lycos.nl/JoyceHoen/moon2000.htm], the last full moon of the second millennium occurred on December 11, 2000." Also avoid using an external link when it's possible to accomplish the same thing with an internal link to a Vincentian Encyclopedia article.

If you want the link to appear with text that you specify, add an alternative title after the address separated by a '''space''' (''not'' a pipe). So if you want the link to appear as [http://www.google.com/ Google search engine], just type:
:<tt><nowiki>[http://www.google.com/ Google search engine]</nowiki></tt>

''Note'': Using certain characters, such as a pipe (<tt>|</tt>) in the URL of the link will cause the link to fail; however, URL syntax provides the ability to specify any character in a URL as a hexadecimal equivalent to its ASCII representation, so you can, for instance, write <tt>%7C</tt> instead of the pipe character. 

When placed under the "External links" heading, the links should be listed in bullet-point format:
:<tt><nowiki>==External links==</nowiki></tt>
:<tt><nowiki>*[http://www.google.com/ Google search engine]</nowiki></tt>

== Experiment ==
Put your experiments in this page's [[/sandbox/]].

[[Help:Tutorial (Talk pages)|Continue]] with the tutorial.

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