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Linking between stories in Zahmoo

One of the best ways to add value to your story-bank is to create links between stories.

Links are a type of metadata: “this goes with that”, rather than a story in its own right. Sometimes, though, another kind of story arises from patterns and trends that we can see from the connections – and in business, in a community, and even in a family-history, those can be some of the most important stories we can find.

But to find those patterns, we first have to create the links. In Zahmoo, there are several ways you can do this.

The first option is to use the built-in Related-story function in Zahmoo. This uses the ‘Story-number’ field – automatically created by Zahmoo when you post a new story, and shown in the top-left of the grey box directly under the text on the story-display page. It’s also shown to the left of each story-summary in the search-results page.

There are two ways to create a Related-story link. The first method assumes that you’ve already created both stories:

• find and note the story-number of the story you want to link to
• open the detail-page for the story you want to link from
• over on the right of the detail-page there’s a grey bar that will list any existing related-story links, and a form marked ‘Story-number’
• enter the story-number of the other story, that you’d previously noted, and click the ‘Link’ button
• the title of the story will now be shown in the list on the right, above the ‘Story-number’ form
• click on that link to take you to the detail-page for the other story; you’ll note that the ‘Related stories’ list for this story now also includes a link back to the story you’d linked from

The other way to create a Related-story link is only available when you’re about to add a new story. At the top of the detail-page for any story, you’ll see a button marked ‘New related story’. If you click on that link, rather than the ‘New story’ button, the new story that you create will automatically include a link back to the story where you’d started, and vice versa.

At present, there’s no comment attached to the link itself, so you might want to add a comment to each story to say why you’ve linked them together.

This works for all story record-types: text, audio, video and image. And you can link between story record-types, too – an easy method to associate a photograph with a family story or an in-person audio-interview. Useful!

In the next post we’ll explore two other ways to link between stories: using comments, and using tags.

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Image credit: Threads by The Big Quack under a Creative Commons BY-2.0 licence.

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