External Link Icon

Note: while I’m no longer using special icons to indicate external links on the site, this is still a useful tip.

Another “text instead of image” trick like RSS in CSS is the small arrow icon you see next to external links. Some sites do that with small images. While checking out Wikki Wakka, I noticed theirs were actually text, rendering an HTML entity code of an infinity symbol — ∞ — which in the raw HTML is ∞

Splendid idea, I thought, but I didn’t want to do the same exact thing they had.

Enter the Web Design Group’s (WDG) HTML entities reference page, where you can find all sorts of neat letters and symbols, including the ⇒ “rightwards double arrow” or ⇒

And then Notanda, during its processing of my saved plaintext file entries, automatically adds that code at the end of external links.