WordPress has been around in form or another for most of this century. There is an overwhelming amount of documentation posted on the web. One example is information about post formats.

Some of what’s available is about how the post format code works. The rest just mentions that they’re available. I didn’t find one single source that answered the very simple question:

What do I type into the post editor, and how does it look on my blog?

Link post — what it is

A link post is a (usually) short post meant to share a link to another site. The way it’s displayed is very theme dependent. Not all themes support post formats. A smaller group supports the link post. With a compatible theme, sharing links is easy. The WordPress documentation has a list of themes supporting post formats.

In most themes supporting link posts change where the post title is linked. Usually clicking the post title loads the full post. With a link post, the post title becomes a link to another site. Because of this, short posts are work better. The focus is the external link, and why it’s interesting.

A well designed theme will add a symbol to the title. This makes it clear the title is an external link.

Link post — how to

With a theme that supports post formats, you will have a choice of the ones available. The pickers have a different look based on which post editor is used.

Once the link format is selected, the first link in post body will be used. It will become the target of the post title. The link can be anywhere in the body of the post. It can be “invisible” with no linked text,

<a href="http://www.example.com" />

or with normally linked text,

<a href="http://www.example.com">This is linked text.</a>

Both can be used. Any other links in post body will have no effect on the link post format. Only the first one matters.

How I use this

I have a template for creating link posts. It makes it easier to keep the formatting consistent.

First I start with a block quote of text from the page I’m linking to. The page URL is linked with a section symbol at the end of the quote. Then I include a comment at the end. With only one link in the post, it becomes the title link when I choose the link post format.

This is my template:

[gist]4084d236484a6edb9bec[/gist]

I hope this helps explain exactly how link post formats work from the writer’s view.