I haven't tried to publish many articles over the past few weeks as I rewrote part of my web site, brought in images, took some more training on board, did some more research , joined Jaaxy and played with that, found some keywords and then started writing.

Anyway today I had finalised my next article so into Street Articles we go.

No problem with getting my draft into the article space, from MS Word.
Spent a few minutes rewriting a few points - not too much because I tend to spend far too much time on wordsmithing. Then added in the Bold bits to make it more visually attractive - well I thought it did anyway.

Got an appropriate image, cropped it using my on line free cropping tool, uploaded it and so we were only left with adding the links to my web site.

Had got to 900 words (a bit unusual for me as usually I am a 500 person), so I could add three links and I found what I thought were the appropriate areas for them.

Now comes the funny thing. First of all I must apologise but I tend to be a copy and paste person so I had in my copy the name of my web site and I copied this into the space in the link box where it should go. Did this three times, one more total check of the article, and then tick the acceptance box and hit save and publish.

Then I see an error message. Your link appears to be broken - please fix or ignore.

I had no real idea what a broken link was although on reflection it is intuitively obvious really.
So into the Publishing Guidelines in Street Articles and there it tells you that a link must point to an actual up and running web site, or it will be classed as broken - in other words it doesn't take the reader anywhere if they click on it.
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Okay I can live with that but hadn't I just pasted the link in? So back to the article and unlink all three followed by the same link procedure. Not surprisingly this produced the same error message. So I checked my web site still existed through Google - whew thanks be that it is still there.

Okay what else to try. For some reason I don't know why I decided to unlink the first link, and try to link by typing in the name of my web site into the link box. After hitting ok I noticed that the original two links still left in the article were in blue underline and the one I had just done by typing in the website name was in cerise (is that the right color - I am afraid my color sense is appalling). So something was happening with these links. I obviously then delinked the other two and linked them by typing in the name of my website and changed nothing else.

Guess what - the article is now pending waiting for the moderator - no more error messages?

So I guess the mesage here is that when you are adding links don't be a copy and paste person like me, actually type in your website name otherwise you may get this broken link message.

The other thing is that we all now know what a broken link is don't we?

Enjoy your day!

Hudson.