Recently I came across the following WorkFlowy question on Twitter:
Twitter is great for getting to the point, but often one might come across as unloving, uncaring and unsympathetic. This post is quite the opposite… it’s loving, caring and sympathetic toward those who’d like to simplify their link life in WorkFlowy. Perhaps a tad more minimalism would be in order for some – and I don’t think an embedded-link dynamic is necessarily a cure-all. In fact, I think the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) modus operandi we currently have is just perfect.
There’s something for everyone in this post. Let’s get to it…
WYSIWYG
Personally I like to see the entire construct of hyperlinks, just the way they are… but if you feel they clutter things up for you, here follow an assortment of tips to tame your links:
1. In the 2nd line of a note
I do this a lot. Pop your link into the 2nd link of a note. The link remains hidden until you tap/ click on the 3 dots: the note expands to reveal your (clickable) link:
2. Nested in a child list
I sometimes do this, especially if a tag index is involved – like in this shared list of all WorkFlowy blog posts:
In fact, in the above example, there’s no reason why the hyperlink could not go in the 2nd line of the note. Either way, I like to pop in a guillemet at the end of the line to indicate that there’s a link (or extra information) tucked away in a note or a child list:
3. Clip to WorkFlowy
One click of rawbytz’s Clip to WorkFlowy extension (or bookmarklet) copies both the tab title and URL of a site to the clipboard in one go, ready to paste into WorkFlowy:
A site’s tab title goes into a WorkFlowy list title… and the hyperlink into its note. Now if you wanted to clip an internal WorkFlowy list to link to elsewhere, Clip to WorkFlowy neatly packages your list title as a reference:
4. Link-shortening services
There are a handful of great services that can take monstrous links and give you a short-and-sweet link that takes you to where you need to go: ow.ly, bit.ly and goo.gl. I use bit.ly and, once again, tuck small lists away in notes. Here is how I might shorten a long-ish hyperlink (“MC” indicates that it’s a “MailChimp” URL):
Spice up your link life
These next 4 tips involve the Stylish extension. If you’ve been following the WorkFlowy blog over the last year, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of this beauty of a tool. If you’re a complete newbie, here’s a complimentary download of the entire chapter from my book.
5. Customize your link style globally
You may want your hyperlinks to stand out or look noticeably different from the rest of your text in WorkFlowy. Differentiation goes a long way in decluttering. You’ll have seen in all of the graphics thus far that I choose to style my links blue and use a font called “traveling _typewriter”. In your Stylish style, you’d only need to change those two pieces of information (highlighted below). If you’re new to this, don’t forget to download my Stylish chapter…
6. Customize your links by domain
In addition to a global link style, you can also customize your link styles according to their domain. Below you’ll see a screenshot of different colored links:
One can give different types of WorkFlowy links different colors. For instance, you can color shared and embedded WorkFlowy lists red and internal WorkFlowy lists purple. I color my Dropbox links green and WorkFlowy blog post links gold. All you need do is change up the domains and colors pictured in the following screen shot (You can change up other factors, but color is a good start)…
Here’s a shared list with the CSS code (courtesy of rawbytz)
7.1 Hide any part(s) of a link
I discovered that you can hide certain parts of a link… and the link will still function as it should. In the free chapter download, I walk you through how you can hijack WorkFlowy’s Underline span and do all sorts of things with it. Once again – originally a rawbytz brainchild. For this next hack, we’ll hijack the Underline+Bold+Italic combo to make certain parts of a link “disappear”. Let’s take my long-ish Dropbox link of a PDF download and see how we might simplify it:
All I do is hide the parts of the link I don’t want to see by Underlining+Bolding+Italicizing them. As you can see, the final link still works as the download goes into effect the moment I click on the remaining, trauncated link.
Naturally, there are multiple options at our disposal for truncating links this way. A couple more examples…
You could keep as much or as little of the beginning of the domain name. Remember, I’m not deleting anything, I’m hitting Ctrl+U,B,I:
We could also add a “www.” just after the “https://” and hide everything else. That gives us a clickable “www” link, which we can add a reference to if desired:
Here’s the CSS code you might want to install as a standalone style.
7.2 Name your own link
Following the advice here, here and here (Layne, Frank and rawbytz), you can append “?Your_Description_Here” to your URL and hide everything from the “?” back to get descriptive links like so:
* If you want to create your own links with a saved search, substitute the “?” with a “#”.
If you want to get “spaces” between words, include underscores: “Twitter:_WorkFlowy_Search”. You can take it a step further and make those underscores transparent by including this code in your Stylish style (and Underlining+Italicizing the underscores):
span.contentUnderline.contentItalic {
color: transparent !important;
}
8. Truncate long links to 250px
Copy (and create a standalone Stylish style with) the code in this comment by @nameanyone to truncate all your links to a maximum of 250 pixels long. When you hover over the links, they stretch to their actual length:
And that’s a wrap!
Do share any of your WorkFlowy link tips in the comments below. Pretty please with a cherry (or two) on top. 🍒
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