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PUTTING HTML INTO YOUR BLOG |
Setting up a blog is simple. In a few minutes, you've got your very own digital printing press. Just type and click, you're published! The more you blog, the more you'll want to blog. As you grow more prolific, you may want to take your posts a little further in terms of presentation. If you're new to web publishing, you might not know how to do some of the things everybody else already seems to know, like adding images to your posts or creating links.
Well, my friend, you have come to the right chapter. Use the HTML references here to blog with the best of them. From simple text formatting to displaying images within your posts, this guide covers the HTML that most new bloggers usually ask about. Although it's true that many blog publishing platforms offer What-You-See-Is-WhatYou-Get (WYSIWYG) text-editing interfaces that work just like an online version of Microsoft Word, it's still helpful to have a little bit of HTML knowledge.
When the web was young, HTML was merely a way to format simple, get-the-job-done web pages. After people started designing with HTML, tweaking and bending it here and there to create interesting and functional layouts, HTML grew beyond its original scope. Using HTML within blog posts takes you back to some of that straightforward information formatting HTML was originally all about.
To use HTML in your blog posts, you need to know about tags. A tag tells the browser to do something, and sometimes, what's called an attribute goes inside the tag to tell the browser just how to do it. Most tags need to be placed around the text you'd like to format.
The tag for creating bold text is <b></b>. Here is an example of a tag in action using the bold tag: <b>I want this text to appear bold</b>
The <b> opens the tag and the </b> closes it. It is very important that you remember to close a tag. If you don't close a <b> tag with </b>, for example, all the text on your blog that follows the opening <b> tag could end up being bold (or linked, or italicized—whatever tag you are attributing to the text). Not all tags need to be closed, but most of them do.
Finding just the right words to describe something succinctly is part of the joy of blogging, but sometimes you just need the power of a thousand words in one pixel-powered punch. One of the questions most frequently asked by new bloggers is, "How do I include an image in my post?" or something along those lines.
When you're blogging with images, you first have to realize that the image must already be uploaded to the web to be displayed in your blog post. Then, the site that's hosting the image needs to allow offsite linking of images. Many ISPs will give you web space with your Internet service. Check to see whether yours also allows offsite linking. If you'd rather not even think about FTP, you should choose a blog provider that helps you find and upload images from your hard drive.