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Jürgen Hermann
Jürgen Hermann

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🗣 Communication Hack – Use Labelled Links

Do your readers a favor and use the “Copy as Markdown for Chrome & Firefox” add-on to post web links.

When you post links to some information bit on the web or your intranet, using raw technical links typically reduces information content. For example, a link featuring just a post number (…/post/0815) is purely technical, and takes up a lot of space while having almost zero information content – it just tells your audience the target site via the domain, and that is all.

🌐 🚑 Copy as Markdown for Chrome & Firefox to the rescue.

The above link was created like this:

Copy as MD Example

Using that context menu item copies the link including its label (or the current selection if there is one, like shown above) as markdown text into your clipboard. Markdown is a universal format that can be pasted into lots of channels: Rocket.Chat and other web chats, blog sites like this one, many wikis (like Atlassian Confluence), etc.

In Confluence, the trick to know is the “Insert Markup” menu item in the editor (Ctrl-Shift-D), enabling you to paste the markdown text almost directly into any page – just make sure the format drop-down above the text area says markdown and not Confluence wiki markup.

So do your audience a favor, install that add-on, and in future provide them with readable links that allow them to judge whether they need to click-through on that link.

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