John’s Jottings

I had the need this morning to link to an individual paragraph within an article. Occasionally via my “series of Jabberings articles”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/cgi-bin/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=5&search=jabberings I will include links or commentary on numerous topics. Today I wanted to refer to one of those items but of course the permalink only points to the entire article, which wasn’t granular enough for my tastes.

Since I use the Textile text formatting the answer was very simple - just added id tags to the paragraph I need to link to. So to jump right to the paragraph about CRM you can go to “http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/10/16/jabberings_7.html#crm”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/10/16/jabberings_7.html#crm and to go to the tidbit on juggling I can refer you to “http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/10/16/jabberings_7.html#juggling”:http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/10/16/jabberings_7.html#juggling

This is very easy with Textile. Normally a paragraph would begin something like

bq. This is a paragraph about CRM.

To ad an id it is as simple as

bq. p(#crm). This is a paragraph about CRM.

Simple. And if for some reason I wanted to style those paragraphs I can add that id to my stylesheet.

I probably won’t get in the habit of giving an id to a paragraph unless I later link to it, and I doubt very much I’ll add in any way a permalink indicator to a paragraph that does have an id. At least I don’t think I will. Come to think of it that might be a good use of styles, I’ll have to think about it for awhile.