Home » Links and New Pages Online Documentation

Links and New Pages

VoodooPad is a tool to help you organize information. One of the most obvious ways to do this is to use hyperlinks, popularized by the World Wide Web.

Although hyperlinks, or links, on the web are a great way to find information and dig through related topics, most people have not had the tools or the experience with HTML (the markup language of most web pages) to make use of this organizing tool for their own notes and ideas.

Let's start fresh by creating a new VoodooPad document (by pressing Cmd-Shft-N) and removing all of its content. To do that, click anywhere in the text area of our new Work Area, choose Edit->Select All and press the Delete key.

In the new blank window, let's note some things we've discovered about VoodooPad. Type (or Copy from this tutorial and Paste) into the Work Area the following indented text:

My VoodooPad notes:

Uses HyperLinks
Creates pages automatically when needed
Allows aliases to access my pages

If you've entered the text exactly as shown above in the new page, notice that the words "VoodooPad" and "HyperLinks" are underlined. The reason that they're underlined is that they were created as default links. During input of text, whether typed in or Copied from the clipboard, VoodooPad parses the text looking for words that are mashed together. Basically, VoodooPad is looking for two or more sequences of uppercase letters in each word and when it finds such a word on its input, it immediately makes a potential link out of it.

The difference between a potential link and a real link is that no page yet exists for a potential link. That page is created, instead, the first time the potential link is clicked. To watch this happen, let's open the Pages List for our document. To do that, choose Window->Palettes->Pages List.

When the window appears, notice that there is only one page listed, "Index". That's because the Index page (or Home page) is always created as part of creating the new document. Now, let's click on the word VoodooPad and watch as a new page appears in the window and it's name appears on the Pages list.

As before, we'll add some text to be able to distinguish the new page from another one that VoodooPad might create just like it. So, on the new page named "VoodooPad", enter the following line:

A tool for linking related information through local HyperLinks.

Next, click the Home button in the Toolbar to return to the first page. Now notice that though both "VoodooPad" and "HyperLinks" are underlined, only "VoodooPad" is displayed in blue. That's because "HyperLink is still only a potential link and "VoodooPad" is a link to a real page. Once again, watch the Pages list to the right as you click on the word, "HyperLinks".

A second new page, named "HyperLinks" has been created appearing in the Pages list. On this new "HyperLinks" page, enter the following line:

VoodooPad's most used organizing principle.

as a brief note on HyperLinks as they relate to VoodooPad.

As you enter this line, notice that the word "VoodooPad" immediately turned to blue and became underlined as you typed the last letter. VoodooPad has recognized that this was a potential link and found the page it references, so it displays it as a bonafide link. Also note that no new page named "VoodooPad" was added to the Pages list. Since it already existed, there was no need to create another.

If we click on the word "VoodooPad" on the "HyperLinks" page, notice that it takes us back to the "VoodooPad" page on which we typed its definition. While we're on the "VoodooPad" page, we might want to add to the information here. So let's add the following new text:

Always open for editing, additions

Now that we've moved through a few pages, let's look again at page navigation. To retrace the path we took to get here, try clicking the Back button in the Toolbar until it grays out (indicating that it's no longer active). Now click the Forward button until it does the same to move us forward to the end of our path.

Like browser Forward buttons, the path forward is only retained until we change our path. So if we've gone back a few pages and then click on another link to move forward, our previous Forward path will be deleted.

At this point we should be on the VoodooPad page in our Work Area. Let's add the following line to our notes on that page:

A potential HyperLink is created whenever we smash capitalized words together.

As we enter this line, we notice that the word "HyperLink", though underlined, is not displayed in blue. That means that we've created a potential HyperLink, but there is no page to go with it yet. Of course, the reason is that we first pluralized the word "HyperLink", so only the plural form has an associated page. We have three choices, then: we can modify the line to integrate the plural form, "HyperLinks", we can click the word in its singular form to create a new page and repeat what we've put in the page for the plural form, or we can create an alias, so that both words point to the same page.

Clearly, the last of these options is the preferable one, so to create a "HyperLink" alias for "HyperLinks", either click on the word "HyperLinks" in the page, or double click on it in the Pages list to get to the page for the plural form. Next, click on the Info button in the Toolbar to make an Info sheet appear. Under the box labeled "Aliases:" at the bottom of the page's Info sheet, click on the "+" sign and enter the word "HyperLink" in the input text box that appears. To complete the input field, press either the Tab key or the Return key, then click the Close button.

If we now go back to the "VoodooPad" page by clicking on the link on the "HyperLinks" page, we can see that the word "HyperLink" (singular) is displayed in blue, indicating that it's a real hyperlink to a real page. Click on it, and we see that we've arrived back at the page labeled with the plural "HyperLinks". While we're back on the "HyperLinks" page, lets open the Info sheet again by clicking on the Info button in the Toolbar and add two more aliases to the page:

hyper link
hyper links

Let's now return to the "VoodooPad" page and type the following note:

A hyperlink is a hyper link is a HyperLink is a HyperLinks is a Hyper Link is a Hyper Links.

As we enter this line, notice that each form of "hyperlink" whether capitalized or not, has become a link to our page. In other words, although VoodooPad is sensitive to capitalization when automatically creating potential hyperlinks, it is insensitive to capitalization when entering words that already exist as linked pages.

The result is that once we've created a page for a hyperlink, we needn't enter all possible forms of capitalization as aliases to the page.

We can also create links manually which can be much more flexible than mashed and capitalized words. For instance, enter the following line on the Index page:

Allows manual creation of links from any word or phrase without regard to capitalization.

Notice that none of the words in that line are aliases or potential aliases. In order to change that, select the phrase, "manual creation of links". Then click on the blue Link button in the Toolbar.

As we click on the Link button, notice that we've just created a new page for "manual creation of links", whose name was also just entered into the Pages list. If we use the Back button to go back to the previous page, we also notice that the phrase we selected is now a link.

Another problem arises if we have some material to copy into a VoodooPad document and aren't quite sure where, or even if, it's referenced in the rest of the document. To solve that problem, we can create a new page and give it a name whether the name exists anywhere else in the document or not. So, for instance, copy the following indented text to the clipboard:

VoodooPad pages can be created without a corresponding link.
A new page is created by pressing Cmd-n on the keyboard.
A new page is also created by choosing File->New Page in the menu.
Upon creation, any reference to the new page automatically becomes a link.
After creation, the page title becomes a link immediately upon being input.

Now, go to the Work Area, press the Cmd-n keys to create a new page and enter the word "Pages" into the sheet that drops down for the page title and press Return. Paste the text you copied above from the clipboard to the new page. Go back to the Index page and notice that the word "pages" has become a link on the line "Allows aliases to access my pages".

Creating a page is easy and we've seen a couple ways to do it. How about deleting one of those pages if we created it by mistake or if we simply no longer need it? First we have to be on the page we want to delete. So to illustrate, let's first create a new page called "mistake". Press Cmd-n to display the New Page Title sheet, enter the word "mistake", and press Return. We now have a new page named mistake which is just what the name implies, a mistake. So how do we delete it?

If you see a red "Delete" icon at the far right of the Toolbar in the Work Area, that represents the easiest way to delete a page. If you don't see it, either click on the double arrow heads at the far right of the Toolbar to see and click it, or simply widen the Work Area window until it appears.

When we click the Delete icon, a confirmation sheet appears. When you see it, click the Delete button and the new page named mistake will be deleted from our document. Any links to the new document would no longer be links, but would revert back to regular words or revert back to potential links if they were capitalized words mashed together.

When a VoodooPad document starts to become large, it often becomes helpful to know where all the links are to a given page. For instance, if we are on the "HyperLinks" page, we might want to check all the links to this page for additional information about "HyperLinks" from the context of the sentences in which the links are found.

In order to find back links to a given page, we first go to the referenced page. In order to demonstrate, let's return to the "HyperLinks" page. Once there, choose the menu item Window->Palettes->Backlinks and a Backlink palette listing all the pages with hyperlinks to this page.

If we click on any of the titles in the Backlinks page, it will take us to the page with that title in which we're guaranteed at least one back link to the original page.

Go to Files and Documents