One thing I’m sure many Geocachers wonder is how some people add images, links and flashy design elements to their Geocache listings.

The answer is HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which is basically the code that your Internet browser, like Internet Explorer, reads in order to display a web page. When you create a new Geocache listing and submit it, the server turns it all into html behind the scenes. Since the broswer can’t read your mind, if you don’t use html in your listing it just displays your listing as plain text.

So, now that the explination is out of the way, I’ll show you how to create links and display images in geocache listings.

Creating a link in a geocache listing

1. When composing your listing, you’ll see “The descriptions below are in HTML” option under “Details”. You must tick that box in order for this to work (Very Important!) Please see below:

2. Copy and paste the following line of code into your listing:

<a href="http://www.url.com/">Link Text</a>

3. Replace the URL within the code with the URL that you want the link to point to.

4. Replace the Link Text with whatever you want your link text to be.

So here are two examples for you. If you wanted the words “this is an example” to be linked to http://www.examplesite.com/this-is-an-example-page.php the code would look like this:

<a href="http://www.examplesite.com/this-is-an-example-page.php">this is an example</a>

That would display like this: this is an example

Or if you wanted the URL to display the actual URL the code would look like this:

<a href="http://www.examplesite.com/this-is-an-example-page.php">http://www.examplesite.com/this-is-an-example-page.php</a>

That would display like this: http://www.examplesite.com/this-is-an-example-page.php

That’s all there is to it. Now you can use that code to create links within sentences or anywhere else you want.

Adding images to Geocache listings

Adding images is very similar to adding links. A line of code, just like a link.

1. Copy and paste the following line of code into your listing where you want your image to display:

<img src="http://www.website.com/images/testpicture.jpg">

2. You will need a URL for the image, so the image will need to be upload to a website.
You can do that by uploading your image to a popular image sharing site like Flickr.com or something similar.
These sites give you a URL to your image.

3. Replace the image URL in the code with the image URL of your image.

That’s it. Your image will then display on the Geocache listing!

Fixing the spacing issue when using HTMl in a listing

When you use HTML in your listing, you will notice that all of the text is all bunched up. To fix this you’ll just need to use a few HTML tags. Put this at the beginning of each paragraph:

<p>

And put this at the end of every paragraph

</p>

That will create a white space between each paragraph. Additionally, you can use the following to start a new line:

<br />

That’s it. With the tips in this article you should now be able to easily add links and images to your Geocaching listings.