The techniques described here help you include guitar chord diagrams in your posts by creating a hypertext link to the chord you wish to describe. Using the techniques, you can provide a visual and audio reference for interested readers without resorting to imbedding images into the thread. The chord images come from the University of Virginia Music Department and may either be looked up on their site or specified entirely by you. Many people will prefer the lookup and paste method but whey you're trying to describe "the lost chord" there may be no way to find it in the Online Guitar Chord Dictionary. In those cases, you must resort to specifying the fingering pattern yourself. Here, then, are the techniques I know about at this writing.

First of all, here is a complete Universal Resource Locator (URL) for the Online Guitar Chord Dictionary.

<a href="http://www.lib.virginia.edu/dmmc/Music/GuitarChords/">your text goes here</a>

If you were to copy this text to your clipboard and drop it into one of your posts, you'd get a hypertext link to the dictionary site using what ever text you included in the URL. Be careful not to modify anything except the "your text goes here" part.

Of course dropping that link into your post doesn't provide any diagram, it's only a link to the lookup site.

Here is the general HTML syntax for any link:

<a href="  ">your text goes here</a>

To include an ordinary chord in your post, do the following:
Copy the general link syntax above and paste it into your post at the proper place. Then change the "your text goes here" part to whatever you want to appear in blue with an underline. Now visit the Online Guitar Chord Dictionary site, look up your chord in the dictionary, look at the options provided by the search and select the version you want to use. While you are viewing your selected chord, point anywhere on the page and press your right mouse button. You should see a popup menu giving you a list of choices. Click the option that's called "copy shortcut" or something close to that. You now have the needed URL on your clipboard. Arrow back to the Mudcat site where you are preparing your post, place your blinking insertion point between the quotation marks in the link string and press Ctrl-V on your keyboard or select Edit/Paste from the main menu at the top of your browser. The URL for your chord symbol will be dropped into the link and your task is complete. Now just move down beyond all the link stuff and continue typing your post. When you read your thread later, you'll see your "blue clicky" all ready to point readers to your chord.

To learn how to completely specify your own fingering for a chord, read the next post.

      - Mark