7th December 2001

When I'm looking for cool new stuff to feature, I like lurking in the Lockergnome newsgroups and chat room. There's great stuff in both places, ya know? Well, sometimes I'm faced with a plain link that I'd like to keep as an Internet Shortcut. It's not easy to do if all you have is plain text. You can't right click and "Save Target As" an MP3 file; it should start streaming in your default media player when you single click the link (that isn't a proper hyperlink on a Web page). Have you ever needed to create a bare- bones HTML document with just that single link in it? Put down Notepad, folks. Here's a spin on an earlier GnomeTIP, as suggested by TGC (The Gnome Collector). Either in Internet Explorer's address bar or the Run command field in the Start Menu, enter: "about: <A CLASS=URL href="link"> name </a>" (sans spaces and quotes). Obviously, you'll replace [link] with the full URL, including the "http" part. The [name] variable can be just about anything, as it's what you'll be right-clicking on to "Save Target As" after the impromptu page pops up. It's an ingenious workaround.