Hyperlinks selectively not working

Hey, everyone.

I’ve long used the Marfa theme on my website, stephenschenkenberg.com. A few times this past week, when I attempt to publish a new post, the markdown is not showing up as links.

Attached is one example of a published post from today that I’ve since deleted. Just to test things, I posted it via Safari on Mac, Safari on iPad, and the Mac app. All the same issue. (Updated note: This screenshot shows what it looked like after being published, not the actual markdown in the CMS.)

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I could be doing something wrong, but it seems like the exact same markdown approach as the most recent posts that successfully posted. As another test, when I paste in the exact same markdown to IA Writer, the links show up correctly.

This was also happening in some instances on this projects page. Any time I tried to include a link within each paragraph, the markdown wouldn’t convert. Only when I created a second new paragraph and pasted in the exact same markdown, would it show up correctly.

Any thoughts from others? Many thanks.

It looks to me like you put a space after the closing brace and before the open parenthesis.

Thanks for the reply. That’s how it looks on the (now deleted) published post. But there was no extra space in the actual draft in the CMS, on either of the link instances. That same markdown creates links when I copy it from the CMS and paste it into another editor like iA. I screenshotted just one example, but it’s happened a few different times.

Thanks to anyone who has some thoughts.

Without seeing the raw post content this will be virtually impossible to diagnose, but I’m quite confident it’s not a bug in Hugo. Next time it happens please save the raw text and share.

I understand, thanks.

I just did a test with this same paragraph in a new page. Interesting result, which mirrors the problem I mentioned on my Projects page.

  1. I pasted the same raw markdown into a new page, and published it. When I view the page, it’s the same result as my original screenshot above — the markdown did not present itself as links. (The image comes through, obviously; it’s the links within the paragraph that don’t work.)
  2. As a test, I decided to create a second paragraph that consisted just of a link to Google, then published the page. For some reason, the addition of that additional paragraph and link made the links in the first paragraph work. I changed nothing in the first paragraph. Here’s that page.

The problem with pasting the raw markdown in here is that it immediately — correctly — creates the links. So you can’t actually see the markdown (which in a way shows that it was likely correct). But I’ve pasted it below.

Continued thanks.

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Even a screenshot would help-- or use something like pastbin or a Github gist to share the raw text. This is 100% a syntax thing. Micro.blog uses Hugo which uses goldmark, which is a very highly tested, widely used, standards compliant Markdown processor, so there’s something about how you’re writing your markdown that is not right.

Hey, thanks so much for staying with me. Very much appreciate it. I’m attaching a screenshot of the Micro.blog test page I referenced above.

I’m all ears to learn what I might be doing wrong.

Before posting this reply, I just went back to the exact same markdown that I’ve been using the entire time, copied and pasted it into a new post, and published the post.

Went to view — and it worked.

I then opened up the post within Micro.blog and selected two tags/categories, then resaved it.

Then it went back to the prior version of not working. So I deleted the post.

I did not touch anything within the markdown — nothing. Simply added tags, then resaved.

To add to the oddities, the test page I linked to above is now actually working — and I changed nothing about the markdown. The only thing that changed is that it’s been a few hours.

I’m open to any ideas of something I’m doing wrong. But the fact that it doesn’t work, then works — without any change to the markdown — is something I’m not understanding.

Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to engage with this. Happy to keep sharing info and trying to explain it as best I can.

Stephen

I don’t know this for sure, but have you tried without the quotation marks inside of the link text or at least straight quotation marks as opposed curly quotation marks? Some characters may need to be escaped within link text-- I’m not confident that curly quotes count, but they might. A straight quote will be transformed to curly anyway in text, and if that doesn’t work either, you may need to do \"The Zone of Interest\" to escape them.

Thanks, I will look into that.

The instances where this happened on my /projects page don’t seem connected to any quotation mark issues. The markdown works when it’s in a separate paragraph, and not when it’s bumped back up to be part of the first paragraph. That said, I will keep your note in mind as I troubleshoot. Thanks again.