Creating Shortcuts

Shortcuts provide a simple way to create links to other web pages in your online documents. A shortcut is a bit of text that you type inside of quotation marks to automatically create a link from one page to another. For example, if you have a story on your site called My Story you can type this title in quotations marks (e.g. - "My Story") on any other page at your site and it will create a clickable link to My Story.

There are three ways to create shortcuts.

Method #1:

Every time you create a new story (or picture or gem) the title of this new resource automatically becomes a shortcut. You do not need to do anything special to make this happen. For example, if you create a story called My Biography, all you need to do to link to this page from any other page on your site is type "My Biography", including the quotation marks.

Method #2:

Sometimes you may not want to use the story's title to create a link. To continue our example, you might want to be able to link to the "My Biography" page by typing "Bio". There is an easy method to create alternate shortcut text:

1. Go to the web page on your site that contain the story that you want to link to. (In our example, this is the My Biography page.
2. Click on the Shortcuts link in the Editors Only menu at the top of the page. This takes you to the Shortcuts page.
3. Notice that the title of the page you just left appears in the Name box and the actual link appears in the URL box. Replace the text in the Name box with your preferred text; in our example the word Bio.
4. Click the Add New Shortcut button.
5. You can now type the new shortcut text in quotes on any page of your site to create a link.

Method #3:

You can also create shortcuts that link to pages on any other web site on the World Wide Web.

1. Find the site or page on the web that you would like to link to.
2. Find its URL (web address) in the horizontal bar near the top of your browser window. Select this text and copy it.
3. Go to the Shortcuts page on your web site.
4. Type in the short, descriptive Name for this site and paste the URL into the URL box.
5. Click on the Add New Shortcut button.
6. Now you can type this short, descriptive name between quotation marks anywhere on your site to create a link to the site.