How to Link to a Specific Part of a Web Page?
Learn about web apps that let you easily annotate web pages and you can also add deep links to any specific paragraph or sentence on any public web page directly.
A long time article published in The New York Times says that you are reading a web page, and want to share it with your friend. The article is longer and therefore it is likely that your ‘busy’ friend can leave those parts that you really want to read. So how do you focus your attention on the most interesting content on the page?
Genius and TLDRI are useful web apps that allow you to annotate web pages as yellow highlighter pen, which you will use on the printed page. Services allow you to highlight a paragraph or specific sentence on a web page and create direct deep links to the highlighted text. When people click on the share link, they see the original page but with annotated text.
How to annotate and deep link web pages
Genius is a music song website but they also provide a web annotator to help you add context and comments on any web page. The best part about Genius is that you do not have to install any bookmarklet or browser extension to use the annotator. Go to the browser’s address bar and add genius.it / before the page URL.
Sign in next with your Twitter, Facebook or Google account and you will be able to add annotations to the current page. To get started, highlight a sentence on the page and click the Genius button that pops up to add your own comment. Genius will give you a unique hyperlink that will open the page directly with the highlighted annotations.
The next useful app in the category is TLDRify. You need a bookmarklet or browser extension here but there is no need to sign-up for an account to annotate web pages. In addition, unlike genius, which can show annotations left by other users on the same page, the TLDRify link will show only your own highlights.
When you are on a web page page, select any sentence or paragraph, click on the TLDRify bookmark mark and it will create a deeper link to the highlighted text. When people click on the link, the browser will automatically scroll on the annotated text.
Internally, these services make an exact copy of web pages on their own servers, even if the original page has been down or changed, your old quotes can still work.
