Thank you for your comments. I thought that a lot of newbies would have problems with the “not forced” links, and that they would get lost and never come back to my blog if I didn´t use the “open in a new window” for external links. But I do see your point and I didn´t know that this discussion was an old debate.

I will do something about it, first I will check out some of the most popular blogs to see how they are doing and then I will start using the “not forced” method.

… and thank you for telling me about the comment box. I just installed this new theme and I haven´t seen the comment box before you told me about it.

Honestly, it is no longer a debate but a done decision.

As for not hearing from readers who find forced links annoying, they often don’t come back. It’s THAT annoying.

With the advent of tabbed browsing, your forced opening of a window puts a tab at the back of the tab queue where someone might not find it if they have their tabs set to open in the background. So they click and click and click and nothing happens. When they get to the end of their tab list, they find 4 tabs of the same page. They’ve already closed your page, so do you think they are going to come back and complain?

As for Tim Linden’s issue of the CTRL key combined with the mouse, use the center button (or scroll wheel button) of your mouse to open a link in a new window/tab. It’s easy.

By letting your readers control how they want to read your web pages and the pages you link to, you give them the power. By forcing links, you take away that power, and trust me, I’ve heard from a lot of folks who hate their power being taken away.

I would, however, recommend that you enlarge your comment form box. It’s micro small. I can barely read what I’ve written within.

Open them in a new window please! =P