Tech Tip: Adding External Links in Twine 2.0

Hello and welcome to my second Tech Tip involving Twinery.org!

Since my first story using twine, I have been trying to figure out how to add external links, or link that when clicked will take you to an outside webpage. I wanted to use this to revise my stories and add in links to my other stories, for those who want to read them in a very continuous manner. When looking at different websites, including Twine's own Wiki (lightly outdated) I could not find anything that worked.

Finally, I found a Twine Help Forum (found here) with a problem post asking for help regarding external links. From this post, I finally code the line of code I needed to create an external link:

(link-repeat: "LINK NAME HERE")[(open-url: "http://insertyourlinkhere.com"]
I edited the code taken from the forum so you can better see where things would go, such as what you want the clickable link to say and where to put the url you want to go to.

This can go in a twine passage along with everything else. Here is an example of what it can look like from an editing point of view:

(Screen shot of a passage where I used an external link to a Dice Roller)

This took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out, but now that I have it, I plan to go back and edit my stories to include links back to my Story Web page, as well as links that lead straight into the other stories. 

I hope this helps someone else!

Reading Notes: Welsh Fairy Tales (Thomas), Part B

Owen Goes a-Wooing

I like this short story because while it is only 400 words long, it told a story full of different kinds of magic. The mansion under the lake that Owen floated to was great, and there was some sort of time magic going on as well. When Owen arrived to Siwsi, he found out he had been gone for months, rather that a few hours. It makes me think of the time magic in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But in that story, when the siblings think they have been gone for years upon years, they find that back home they were gone for merely hours. This sort of time magic has always been really fascinating to me because I think it can really alter a story and the characters perceptions within it. 

(Old Clock Close Up from Wikipedia)

The Martyred Hound

This story was sad and ironic. The King thinking the dog had eaten his heir, killed the dog, only to find out the dog had actually saved the child by killing a wolf that had gotten in. This story was also relatively short at 600 words, but even within that time, I felt intense sadness when it was revealed what happened. The dog and the King had such a strong bond, it was sad the King killed him needlessly. 

(Enzo the Italian Greyhound on flickr)

Bibliography: "Owen Goes a-Wooing" and "The Martyred Hound" from The Welsh Fairy Book by W. Jenkyn Thomas with illustrations by Willy Pogány (1908).

Reading Notes: Welsh Fairy Tales (Thomas), Part A

Arthur in the Cave

When I read the short explanation before the story, I already knew I would like this story. There's a popular book series that's fairly recent called The Raven Cycle. These books are all about a group of teenagers searching for the sleeping king of Wales. In the book, the King isn't Arthur, however... or at least they don't call him Arthur. They call him Glendower. I love the series (though I haven't finished it yet) so I was excited to read the tale that inspired the books. I've always been a lover of fantasy, and a sleeping King is a fantastic story that I absolutely love. 

In the original, I thought it was really interesting that King Arthur was woken up, and then he decided to listen to the sorcerer saying it was not time to wake up. Truthfully, I expected Arthur to get mad we was woken up for nothing and maybe fight and/or kill the intruders. 

(King Arthur by Charles Ernest Butler on Wikimedia)