How to Create and Use Share Links

Every Web Studio ⎋ project has its own published page, a real web page that shows your finished project without the code editor around it. Published pages are perfect for showing off your work, linking projects together, or turning in a project.

Make Your Project Public

Before you can share a project, you need to make it public.

  1. Open your project in Web Studio and select the Settings toggle.
  2. Under Visibility, select Public.
  3. Select Save settings.

The Web Studio Settings view, with "Public" selected under Visibility.

Once your project is public, a Share button appears in the toolbar. Public projects also appear in the Web Studio gallery and on your profile, and anyone with the link can open and clone them.

Select the Share button in the toolbar. The Share pop-up has two links, each with a Copy button:

Select Open published page to view your published page in a new tab.

A pop-up titled "Share 'Solar System Facts'" with a "Published page" link starting with codecraftworks.dev/web, an "Open in Web Studio" link starting with studio.codecraftworks.com, a "Copy" button beside each, and an "Open published page" button.

Your published page updates on its own every time you save, so you never need to “re-publish.” It may take a moment after saving for the changes to appear.

There will be times when you will want to include links to other projects, either created by yourself or someone else. Or maybe you want to include a link to another website as a source or reference. Adding a link requires use of an anchor tag, represented by <a></a> within the HTML. There are two very important attributes to use when creating a link - the href attribute, which is the URL of the site or project you wish to link, and the target attribute, which determines how the web browser opens the link.

To link to another project, copy its Published page link from the Share pop-up. The HTML for a typical link will look like this:

<a href="https://codecraftworks.dev/web/abc123/" target="_blank">My Other Project</a>

The _parent and _top attributes are not used often nowadays, but you may find them being used in older websites that still use HTML frames for layout.

A good rule to follow is to use _blank for external links and _self for internal links. So for instance, if you are creating a link to a reference page found on a site like Wikipedia, use _blank for the link. If you are creating a navigation and are using different projects to represent different pages of a website, use _self for the links (or do not include the target attribute as _self is the default behavior).

A side-by-side image of a basic webpage showing the HTML on the left and the output on the right

Notice that in the above example, the navigation links do not have a target attribute. This is because this project is using other projects to simulate a multi-page website.

Below are the links to the project pages so you can experiment and see for yourself how internal navigation works in project files: