Futzing with Javascript: Link Generator and HTML Concatenator

I was a bit lost last Saturday, so I want to spend some time futzing around with Javascript this week. I've done a lot of HTML concatenating in Excel so wanted to see if I could replicate this task in Javascript and it worked. This is a handy script if you have a lot of links to make and want to just enter the link text and URLs.



From this basic idea, you can do some pretty cool stuff if you are so inclined to code it. For example, anyone who does SEO might want to track the leading web sites for certain search keywords. You could create a simple form where a user would enter a keyword in a search box, then would click one of three submit buttons.

First button links to: http://search.yahoo.com/search?p= + [keyword]
Second button links to: http://www.google.com/search?q= + [keyword]
Third button links to http://www.ask.com/web?q= + [keyword]

The buttons would pop a new window showing you immediately what the front page sites are for the keyword term on each page. In this way, by simply creating a URL that triggers a query, you could actually allow users to access a lot of their favorite sites from your site.

The trick is remembering that you have to use single quotes around the URLs when generating the HTML as using double quotes for this in Javascript would confuse the browser.