While you always can use normal HTML to create a link (i.e. <a href="http://www.antville.org">antville</a>), antville provides a special macro called "link". depending on the options you specify, the link-macro will change it's behaviour.

<% link to="http://www.antville.org" %> will result in www.antville.org.

<% link to="http://www.antville.org" text="antville" %> will show this link: antville.

<% site.link to="topics/polls" text="polls" %> creates a link to polls.

please mind the use of site.link - this simply means that you tell your site to create a link (you can also use <% story.link ...%>). And that again means that everything you specify in the to=...-option will be relative to your site (or your story).

Of course you can also use the link-macro for ftp-, https-, mms- or whatever-links. The only thing that an external URL must contain is ://

And finally, for the lousy ones, antville is able to detect URLs in a story or comment, so when you simply write http://antville.org antville will display http://www.antville.org