This is a very frequent story for me (and I'm sure for many others too):
- Write up an answer, recognise two or three places that would be better served as links.
- Open a new tab, locate the desired resource, a full help page perhaps or (often) another question on the site
- From destination page, copy page title, header text, or first few words of page
- Paste into #1 where appropriate (Oops, forgot opening bracket: Ctrl+← a few times to get to beginning of phrase, type "[", Ctrl+→ to end of phrase, type "]")
- Go back to destination page, put focus on address bar, make sure entire URL is selected, copy
- Go back to answer page, type "(", paste URL, type ")". A lot smoother this time because we remembered to bracket before pasting; doesn't always happen that way though (and let's not forget the pain of forgetting which
[]()
is for link text and which is for URL)
A little of this pain is alleviated by using the keyboard shortcut for creating links (Ctrl+L if you didn't know, thanks for that!) in the edit text box, but only a little as you still need to copy and paste twice, and it doesn't work for comments.
Creating posts with good content and readable answers with links to more information is something important to me. I spend the extra time and effort to make it happen in spite of the work. There are many others for whom that extra is not worth it, so they'll usually either a) not link at all, or b) post the unreadable line-wrapping URL in-situ.
Sooo, Dear Lazyweb: can someone who knows how to do this stuff please create a bookmarklet or some other easy-to-use tool which can turn this:
http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=p&msa=0&msid=110062113008218362869.00047dc44105664577020&ll=42.494251,-71.142998&spn=0.011075,0.017252&z=14&source=embed
into this:
[Time Traveller drop points](http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=p&msa=0&msid=110062113008218362869.00047dc44105664577020&ll=42.494251,-71.142998&spn=0.011075,0.017252&z=14&source=embed)
at the click of a button (and key-press too for bonus points)?