The Fourth Step: Anchor Drop
The Fourth Step
Step Navigation
Day #4
(No need to click here . . . yet.)
With our Building the "Build a Blog" Blog side bar fixed up rather nicely, we wanted to add more ways--easier ways--for our readers to move around inside our blog. Web developers who own web sites spanning many different web pages do not need to contend with ultra long content pages; but rent-a-page bloggers are usually offered but a single page to post their articles. By the time a blogger posts a handful of articles, the casual reader will have to scroll down for ages before locating an article that interests them enough to stick around.
Even if your blog is beautiful and sparkly, what are the odds that someone will sift through all your articles? It's a long shot at best, we think--especially against a random web surfer (the rare individual who does a google and clicks onward to your door step) having the patience to give you the time of day.
So let's make it easier for that guy to find something interesting.
We're talking about setting anchors everywhere throughout your blog. What's an anchor? An anchor is simply a target for a link. An anchor is an address, or, rather, the address of a specific apartment number within a mega-complex. Your single blog page will be your mega-complex, and your anchors will be the rooms.
The first step is deciding where the most important places live on your blog. For Stone Soup Blog Forum, the most essential location on our page is the navigation system, which, thanks to our side bar work, is ready for action.
We wanted our readers to have easy and frequent access to our lesson list. If someone stumbles into our blog by clicking on an article, and the article happens to be Step 32 rather than Step 1, we need that reader to click to that first step, or even to our mission statement, before they despair and flutter away, lost and lorn.
Therefore, we dropped an anchor at the beginning of every step we post, and another anchor at the side bar heading, Chronicles. Go ahead, we dare you: give it a click.
Setting an anchor at the top of an article is an easy, one-step process. When you are writing an article in Advanced View, fill in your title and then move on to the body. In the second toolbar row, about two thirds of the way toward the right side, you should see a pretty little anchor icon. When asked for an anchor title, give them one.
Our example will be step4, the title of our anchor at the top of this very article (note: the link "here" at the top is not the anchor, but rather a link back to a specific point in the content).
Okay, you're done. Not too bad, right? Just remember your anchor name, and where you put that particular anchor. Now, suppose your article becomes ridiculously long (the article you're reading right now might be an appropriate example), or suppose you are writing an altogether different article that refers to the first article. If you don't want to force your reader to wipe the dust off your archives, you simply add a link to the anchor.
When you click 
the cool smiley, you are really clicking a link to our step4 anchor (at the top, click the here link to return). We inserted a smiley here, as you can see, but you can use words, photos, or whatever weird crap you think up for yourself. We highlighted the smiley, and clicked the link icon on the toolbar, located two spaces to the left of the anchor icon. This is the link address we provided:
Actually, we really only needed to provide #step4 for the link address, because "#" tells your browser to take you to the requested anchor located on your current page. However, when tBLOG archives one of your articles, or moves you to the commenting page, you are no longer located at the blog home page. To counter, we ask the link to direct us to a specific page, and then to the specific anchor located on that page.
That's it. Anchor dropped, link set. As you most likely noticed, most of the links we included in this article are links to anchors on our own page.
If you want to be as clever as we are, if you want to stick an anchor in your own navigation bar just like we did, you should now be able to do it yourself (if you understood Step 3: Heading to the Side Bar).
However, if you have any trouble (remember, each template behaves differently), do not hesitate to ask us for a blathering, futile solution to your problem.
--Stone Blogs