A Not-So-Brief Guide to SLurls

This started out as ‘A Brief Guide…’, but I found that there was more to say about them than I thought!

If you are familiar with SecondLife, you will certainly have come across SLurls. In-world, they appear as hyperlinks (you can see them as such in chat or in notices, amongst other places). They look like normal web addresses, like this:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ling/183/113/54

When you click on them in-world, instead of launching a browser they will display a landmark, from which you can teleport to the location.

So far, not very interesting. Where things get a little more interesting is when you come across an SLurl on a normal web-page, outside of Second Life. If you click on one of these, you will end up on a web-page that shows the Second Life world map, highlighting the location that the SLurl points at:

What happens when you click on the ‘Teleport’ button depends on whether you have Second Life installed, and (if it’s installed), whether it is running at the time.

If Second Life is already running, a landmark for the location will be displayed for you in the Viewer.

If you have Second Life installed, but it is not currently running, it will be launched, and when you log-in you will be taken directly to the location indicated by the SLurl (although the exact details of what happens will depend on the browser you are using, and possibly the Second Life Viewer as well).

One thing to note is that SLurls work like landmarks, in that if the location has a fixed teleport point, you will be taken there, rather than to the exact location specified in the SLurl.

This is all quite straight-forward, even if it takes several paragraphs to explain. But what if you want to create your own SLurls?

There are three ways to do this. Let’s take the simplest one first. In Second Life, visit the location that you want the SLurl to point to, open up the World Map, and click the ‘Copy SLurl’ button that you should find somewhere near the bottom of the right-hand side.

This will copy the SLurl to the clipboard — you can open up a text or document editor, and simply paste it in.

If you are using Viewer 2, you will also find a ‘Copy SLurl’ option on any landmarks that are stored in your inventory. Right-click the landmark to open the menu that has this option:

Speaking of Viewer 2, it uses a different style of SLurl, and takes you to a different web-page (if you click on an SLurl outside Second Life), but you still get a world map with a teleport button. The main difference is that the web-page is in Viewer 2 style.

If you are interested, here are examples of the old and the new versions:

Old version: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ling/183/113/54

New version: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Ling/183/113/54

Ok, so much for the easiest way of creating SLurls. The second way is slightly more complicated, but adds some very nice features.

Before you begin, you’ll need to know the details of the location that you want the SLurl to point to. To do this, visit the location in Second Life, then open up the world map and take a note of the region name, and the x, y, and z values for the location.

Now visit the SLurl website, simply by using your favourite browser to go to http://maps.secondlife.com (or http://slurl.com if you prefer the old version). On this page you will see a ‘Build your own SLurls’ link, near the top right. This will take you to a new page with various edit boxes on it.

Fill in the Region name, and the x, y, and z boxes, with the values you noted earlier.

For now, leave the other boxes empty, and click the ‘Generate’ button. Your SLurl will appear in the edit box at the bottom. Test it by clicking the ‘Go’ button. You should be taken to a new page showing the World Map for the location which you entered.

Returning to the Build SLurl page, select the generated SLurl, copy it, and paste to wherever you want to use it.

This SLurl will be exactly the same as the one generated by the World Map inside Second Life. However, you can improve on this by filling in the other edit boxes on the Build SLurl page.

The Window Title is the simplest. If you enter some text here and generate an SLurl, when you visit the World Map using it you will see the title appear on the ‘pop-up’ marker for the location.

The Window Message works in a very similar way, adding some descriptive text to the pop-up.

The Window Image is more complicated. For this to work, you need to be able to specify the web address of a picture. If you have your own web-site, you can upload a picture to your site, then fill in the address for it here.

Generate the SLurl again, and click ‘Go’, and now you should see your picture in place of the default picture. As far as I can tell, any size of picture will be accepted (within reason!).

Using the Picture and Description together can be a good advertising tool if you are a Second Life merchant. Here’s an example of what I could do to advertise one of my prefabs:

View the Medieval Farmhouse in-world

I mentioned that there were three ways to create an SLurl, but so far I’ve only shown you two ways. The third way is to construct one manually. This would be a whole post in its own right, but if you are familiar with URLs it isn’t too difficult to roll your own SLurl.

I won’t go into details, but here is a quick breakdown, using the Version 2 format, and taking my ‘Medieval Farmhouse’ SLurl as an example (see the link above):

The basic template is this:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Region/x/y/z?img=[address]&title=[title]&msg=[description]

The first part is the basic URL:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife

This is followed by the Region name and the x, y, z values:

/Ling/193/113/54

There are then three optional parameters: img, title, and msg (the description):

img=http%3A//www.templarcreations.com/blogpics/blog_prefab_0001a.png

title=Medieval%20Farmhouse

msg=22%20prims%2C%2016m%20x%2016m%2C%20L%24250

As you can see, the ‘msg’ parameter can easily get messy, because you have to replace any special characters.

And finally … the Teleport button on the World Map page conceals another URL, but in a different format, like this: secondlife://Ling/193/113/54. It is possible to link directly to a location using this format. This will by-pass the
World Map, and (assuming that Second Life is installed) go straight to Second Life. It probably isn’t a good idea to use this, because it is not exactly user-friendly, and if the user doesn’t have Second Life installed, instead of ending up on the World Map page (which will lead them to more information about Second Life) it will simply display an error. On the other hand, for Second Life users it gives more direct access (I can imagine it being used to create a web-page of useful landmarks, for example).