Philobiblon: The Dictionary problem online

Monday, November 14, 2005

The Dictionary problem online

I can still remember when as a child of about seven I got my first dictionary. I was almost beside myself with excitement. (Yes I was an odd child.) While I'd been proudly able to spell "elephant" before I went to school, there were so many traps in the English language. Now all my problems would be solved.

Then, when I got the dictionary, I realised you had to pretty well know how to spell the word before you could look it up. It was a crushing disappointment.

Now I'm in the middle of taking my computer "language" to a whole new level. Yep, the MySQL database seems to be working nicely thank you - not that I'm quite sure what it is. And I've even managed to wrongly install some Wordpress themes, uninstall them and reinstall themn correctly.

But the dictionary problem is striking again. There are things I want to do - and there are no doubt directions on the web as to how to do them, even some pitched at my level - but I don't know how to look them up.

You might call all that a complicated introduction to a question (since I know some very tech-savvy people read this blog). What I want to do is to be able to put the first couple of pars of a post up on one blog, then with a "more" bottom send people to another blog to read the rest, BUT, so that they enter the post at the right place i.e. where they stopped reading in the first blog.

Can anyone either tell me what this is called, or tell me how to do it?

All help gratefully received!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I know exactly the problem you're talking about!

The bits of HTML you want to do something like that yourself are the anchor tag A NAME and #

Fairly simply (I hope)... Starting at the blog post with just the opening lines, you would need to have your link to

http://[URL of the full post]#more

which might look like this:
Read more...

And in the full length post, at the point where you'll want the reader to pick it up, you need to insert
{a name="more"}{/a}
(replacing the curvy brackets with pointy ones to make them html tags)

That should work. If it isn't clear, google the phrase "a name" + html + tutorial and you should get plenty of hits that will explain it better.

Sometimes if you don't know what something is called, but you can see it in action on a webpage, try viewing the source code (in the menu on a PC, View | Page Source; don't ask me where you look on a Mac); with a bit of luck you'll be able to work out what bit of HTML is doing the job and then you have something you can put in a search engine.

11/14/2005 12:50:00 pm  
Blogger Natalie Bennett said...

Brilliant thanks - as you'll see, it has worked!

11/20/2005 12:04:00 am  

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