Paul, I edited your post to correct the link. Click the edit button on your post and see how I formatted using the URL tags.
Any link you paste into your post will automatically become hot, meaning active and clickable. The URL tags are not necessary to make a link clickable, but they ARE great for really long links, as was the case with your auction link. Long links tend to blow out the layout, forcing folks to scroll right in order to read accompanying text. Using the URL tags to wrap and make hot a shorter bit of text is ideal.
Additionally, you might use
tinyurl, one of the Web-God's gifts to Netizens everywhere.
If you have a short link, just paste it without using the URL codes and the link will automatically become hot, like so:
http://tinyurl.com/
