If you are a blogger or even otherwise if you frequently need to create (and copy) links in various formats like plain text, HTML, markdown, mediaWiki and use either Chrome or Firefox, then this tip is for you.

Create Link for Chrome

If you’re using Chrome, you need to install Create Link extension for chrome and you’re done! Just right click on the web page or hyperlink for which you need to create a link and select Create Link menu. Click the format of your choice and your link is ready to be pasted.

Alternatively, you may use the Create Link button in the Chrome toolbar. The toolbar button offers same options to create the link but also give you access to more configurations. The existing options are completely configurable and you may add more options if you want. For e.g. I changed default HTML option by adding title and target attributes as shown below

Default HTML Code

<a href="%url%">%htmlEscapedText%</a>

Modified HTML Code

<a title="%title%" href="%url%" target="_blank">%htmlEscapedText%</a>

You can also use a variable called %input% if you want to specify a custom value during link creation. A input box will pop up to get your input at the time of link creation.

Make Link for Firefox

Above extension for Chrome is actually inspired from Firefox extension called Make Link. Basic functionality is mostly similar to Create Link for Chrome. It also offers a rather useful but experimental feature to create links with the shortened URL. You can use a variable called %tinyurl% to do the same. But in my tests it did not work for me on Firefox 25.0.1.

Colt is another option worth looking at which offers advance functionality like conditional statements which could be very useful in controlling the link output.