May 30, 2016 at 12:27 am

@scheng1 My oldest is making coffee in an old-fashioned stovetop percolator right now. The whole house smells like coffee! I can’t wait for it to be ready 😀

May 30, 2016 at 12:33 am

OK, I’m just trying out the method that @thinker used to post a link. It looked like the link had been purposely embedded in the comment, whereas everyone else’s links seem to just hang there as a raw URL.

So here goes! I’m told to type some text and then enter several times before typing the link. I wonder if it matters if I paste or type it? I’m going to type, because this is what the instructions said to do….

http://172.104.9.193/writing-challenge-top-5-favorite-smells/

Now I have typed the link, and hit return a bunch more times. I don’t see anything happening yet with the link, either to show that it’s becoming “hot” or to hint at the actual embedding of the post. I hope this works!

May 30, 2016 at 12:36 am

It worked! I suspect the trick is to be sure the link is on its own separate line, and not part of a paragraph. I’m going to try it again, but this time I am pasting in @scheng1‘s link for this challenge 🙂

http://172.104.9.193/flavor-fragrance-industry/

I’m not skipping many lines, but just putting the link on its own separate line. Let’s see if this works….

May 30, 2016 at 12:39 am

So yes, it does work! The key is to place the link on a separate line when writing the comment. Do not put it in a paragraph with other text. It can be pasted or typed in, no matter how it gets added. It just needs to be on its own line.

I think if we can all add our links in this manner when we post them for our writing challenges, it would make them more attractive and help encourage our fellow writers to visit them 🙂

May 30, 2016 at 1:27 am

Okay now that is cool. So basically all we have to do is put the link in its own line then hit enter after it a couple of times and then you come up with the whole picture and link in the post like you have? I will try this when I put my link in here. Thanks for the tip.

May 30, 2016 at 3:25 am

@scheng1 I need to give myself time to get caught up too! I’m thinking I’ll aim for about one challenge per week over the summer. I have a couple of ideas in mind already…

I think we could set up the group for writing challenges, but we’d have to ask @support to migrate the earlier discussion threads to that forum.

May 30, 2016 at 3:32 am

@morgoodie you only need to put it on its own line, so hitting enter once is sufficient. If you want to have a bit of extra whitespace around it, go for 2-3 times both before and after you paste in the link. But yes, it’s as simple as that! I wish we’d know about it before. I will definitely use this method in future, and I’m curious as to whether it would work in our posts as well?

May 30, 2016 at 8:35 am

@ruby3881 wow, that looks really nice.

Thanks to @thinker for accidentally figure it out without knowing why!

If this works in post, it may allow us to  get a link to our reference source, if any.

May 30, 2016 at 9:09 pm

WOW @ruby3881

You too made it. It is a nice feature but was hidden uptill now. Finally we discovered it. Yes we can use this tool strategically to grow some traffic. It also looks nice.

You are welcome @scheng1 – I dont know whether it works for post but we can check it out.

May 30, 2016 at 9:20 pm

I am so glad that I noticed what you did, @thinker! And that I thought to ask you what you had done to achieve that effect.

It seems that it doesn’t always work perfectly, and I don’t think e can put the links directly in the first post of a new thread in the forum. They only seem to work in the replies.

It remains to be seen whether we can use this same method in our posts, to link in related content. I was doing that on BlogJob with the help of the Embedly plugin, and I found that it enriched my posts immensely!