THE HTML CODE FOR YOUR BLOG
As a blogger, you simply must be able to do a few things with HTML:
� Create bold or italicized text.
� Create a link to another Web page.
HTML is a language built around the idea of enclosing, or marking up, content that you want to affect. You can also think of it as turning a tag on and then off. A tag is simply an individual HTML code. So in a Web page, you can make a word bold by using the following tag:
This <b>word</b> is bold.
The <b> tag starts the bolding, and the same tag preceded by a forward slash ends the bolding. If you want to bold and italicize a word, try this:
Use <b><i>bold and italics</i></b>.
Finally, you might want to indent some text, perhaps a quote. A special HTML tag is just for indenting, and you use it like this:
The entire block of text is offset from the left margin.
That wasn’t so hard, was it? Just what are you paying those expensive Web developers for, anyway?! Rest assured, it does get harder, much harder. Fortunately for a blogger concentrating on writing, you don’t need to get more complex once your templates are set up to your liking. You simply worry about entering the text, and the surrounding HTML is created automatically.
In this example, the word Google is a link to the popular search engine’s Web site. You create the link by using the anchor tag (<a>) and adding what’s called an attribute — in this case an href(hypertext reference). The value of the attribute (the part in quotation marks) tells the browser what Web site to open when the link is clicked.
When creating a link using HTML, including the full URL of the Web site you are linking to is important, including the http://at the beginning of the address. Leave that off, and the browser won’t understand that it’s looking for a Web server and instead tries to find a file with that name.
You can get a little fancier, still. You can create HTML links that not only take the user to a new Web site, but do so in a new browser window. This is also done with the <a> tag. To do this, use the following code:
The second attribute, target, tells the browser to use a new (_blank) browser window when displaying the URL. Now you’re ready to blog!
Adding photographs.Or perhaps your company’s softball team just cleaned the field with the competition. Whatever the use, if you’re going to use photos on your blog, you need to be able to turn images into Web-ready artwork and then display it in your blog.
Some blog solutions are built specifically for photos — if you need to present visual information more often than textual information, such as an architect or a weather site, for example — you may want to consider one of these.
Obtaining photos to place on your blog is pretty easy. You can use any of the following:
� Digital camera: These come bundled with graphics software of some kind, and they definitely come with a way to transfer images from the camera to the computer.
� Standard film camera: Get a digital CD of images at the time you get your film developed.
� Scanner: If you already have your prints back, or if you have a paper document you want to display, you’ve moved into the realm of scanners. Web images are rarely very high quality, so if you’re going to be scanning photographs or documents and only displaying them online, you can find an inexpensive flatbed scanner quite easily. Scanners also frequently come bundled with graphic software that walks you through scanning in photographs and documents.