go directly to the link wizard


Tag stories so readers may add them to CityTools
Add a link to your pages to help your readers submit stories to CityTools.

The simple way: use our wizard

If you to skip all the details below, visit our handy, dandy link wizard, which will build the link for you when you give it a little information.

Or do it by hand

If you're familiar with HTML and how to write a link tag and want to do it manually, read on.

It can be as simple as one basic element

A simple link can be built with two elements: the CityTools URL for directly adding a story and the URL of your story. We recommend you do more, but this is the minimum requirement.

The CityTools URL for the process of automatic submissions is:

www.citytools.net/write/direct_link.html

You must provide information about the URL to the story you want to submit.

Let's say for this tutorial, we're submitting a story with the url: www.mysite.com/my_story.html

Thus, this HTML code:

<a href="http://www.citytools.net/write/direct_link.html?url=www.mysite.com/my_story.html" > send to CityTools</a>

Is a complete link and would submit the story at www.mysite.com/my_story.html to CityTools.

If you want, you can cut and paste the HTML above, substitute "mysite.com/my_story.html" with your story's URL and you're ready to go with a minimal link.


Encourage readers with even better links

You can add additional information to make sharing your story easier. Also, the extra information makes your story easier to find on CityTools.

Here's how to automatically add a title, a topic and geography to your direct links.

Automatically suggest a title

When readers submit one of your stories to CityTools they may put their own title on it.

However, you can help your readers by automatically suggesting a title when a reader adds one of your stories.

The URL argument used to specifiy a title is called, duh, title

Thus...

<a href="http://www.citytools.net/write/direct_link.html?url=www.mysite.com/my_story.html&title= this is my suggested title" > send to CityTools</a>

...would submit a story from mysite.com with the title: "this is my suggested title"

Automatically suggest a topic and geography

On CityTools people find stories by topic and, especially, by geography.

So if you want people to find your stories, it's good to suggest a topic and geography to a reader using a direct submission link on your site.

For complicated reasons that have to do with internationalization and bilingual sites (more on those coming this summer!) CityTools uses long and unfriendly codes to specify topic and geography.

We know, they're a pain to use. But in the end it will be worth it when you see why we use them. And in any event, we can help to minimize the pain by making it easy to retrieve the codes, as you'll see.

Setting a topic

The URL element to set a topic is called (ta daaa!): topic

You can may find topic codes by going to our topic tool and clicking on a topic.

Let's say we want to add a restaurant review and put it in the topic "restaurants" -- the code for that is: 1A470188-D012-11DB-AD4A-C17B7EBC8A59.

Thus....

<a href="http://www.citytools.net/write/direct_link.html?url=www.mysite.com/my_story.html&title= my restaurant review&topic=1A470188-D012-11DB-AD4A-C17B7EBC8A59" > send to CityTools</a>

... would submit a the story to the "restaurants" category.



Suggesting a geography

CityTools is all about geography and allowing people to find content by geography.

So we strongly encourage you add a geographic id to your links.

Important! Always try to select the narrowest appropriate geographic spot for a story.

Because of the way the CityTools geographic model works, people looking at larger geographic areas will see more narrowly defined content within the larger area.

This means if you tag a story to specific neighborhood in New York, people looking at New York City will find it, as will people looking at New York state, etc.

The URL argument for the geographic id is (wow!): geo_id

Suggest a geography, method 1:

Visit our geo_id tool page to search/browse to the geography that you want.

For example, say we're looking for the code for Concord, New Hampshire. We go to the geo_id tool and enter "concord" there.

It returns a long list of geographic places with "concord" in the name -- boy, Concord is a popular place name!

Scroll down the list and you'll find one that says "concord (a city in new hampshire, usa)" click on that and a box appears that says "get location code for concord" -- click that and the code for Concord appears (E464357C-7D88-11DA-96CB-8887627A6F7C).

Thus if our restaurant review from above is in Concord, New Hampshire, this HTML...

<a href="http://www.citytools.net/write/direct_link.html?url=www.mysite.com/my_story.html&title= my restaurant review&topic=1A470188-D012-11DB-AD4A-C17B7EBC8A59&geo_id=E464357C-7D88-11DA-96CB-8887627A6F7C" > send to CityTools</a>

... would submit a story to the restaurant review section in Concord, New Hampshire.

Suggest a geography, method 2: use postal codes

The following method currently works for those countries where we have a detailed postal code database: the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia. More countries will be added to that list soon.

To use postal codes, we need two URL elements: postal_country and postal_code

You set the postal_code value to a postal code in the region you want for your story.

Please be sure to check links using postal codes. At this writing our database consists of more than 900,000 postal codes. But postal codes change regularly and, while we try to keep up, it is possible (though unlikely) that we might not have your postal code in our database.

The arguments to set the postal_country elements are:
  • United States: postal_country=us
  • Canada: postal_country=ca
  • United Kingdom: postal_country=uk
  • Australia: postal_country=au


Important note: setting geography via postal code always forces the geography to either a city or metro area/region. If you want finer control over the geography, use method 1 above.

In other words, postal_country=us&postal_code=85716 would set the geography to the Tucson, Arizona metro area in the United States.

So, using our example above, if our restaurant review was from Tucson, Az, the whole URL would look like this:

<a href="http://www.citytools.net/write/direct_link.html?url=www.mysite.com/my_story.html&title= my restaurant review&topic=1A470188-D012-11DB-AD4A-C17B7EBC8A59&postal_country=us&postal_code=85716" > send to CityTools</a>



Use an icon for a link

If you want, you can use an icon for the link.

A collection of icons of various sizes can be found here.

You may download a zip (compressed) file of all the images, as well as couple of GIMP and Photoshop files right here

A detailed discussion of how to use images as links is beyond the scope of this how to. If you're going to do this by hand, you probably know how anyway.

If you're not familiar with the different methods of incorporating images as links, please use our wizard to set up your link.

tips!
click on an item below for more info

How do I link to CityTools?

Because of our geographic information, there are lots of additional options for linking to CityTools. We'll have more info on this page shortly!