Hyperlinks and Text Formatting Within A Blog

Hyperlinks and Text Formatting Within A Blog

When posting to a blogging System you do not need to do any complex coding to post text. This is the great thing about blogging, it is easy and fast. What if you want to create a hyperlink though? (For those who do not know, a hyperlink is the underlined blue text that when clicked brings you to another web page). While, unfortunately you do need to do a bit of coding to achieve this, but don't worry its fairly easy.

The basic form of a hyperlink is as follows

<a href="www.the-site-to-link-to.com">The Text You Want To Click</a>

Lets break this down a bit. The <a href="www.the-site-to-link-to.com"> portion is known as the opening tag. It specifies that the text following the closing angle bracket should be a link, and that when clicked, it should direct the user to www.the-site-to-link-to.com.

The next portion is the text that will appear as a link. In some cases this may be the same as the link's address, but in most cases you will want to use something more creative, such as "Click Here" or if you are feeling really inspired, the name of the site.

The final part is the close tag. It is merely the </a> portion. This portion tells your computer that the link has ended, and that the text following should not be a link.

Some examples: Lets say we want to link to the 8M Media and Communications Home page (at http://www.8mmedia.com), who happen to be the sponsors of this excellent blog. You would use the following code:

<a href="http://www.8mmedia.com">8M Media and Communications Home Page</a>

and the result would look like this:

8M Media and Communications Home Page

Other Tricks: There are a few other commands you can use in blogs to make your text fancy. If you want to make your text italic just use the commands below

<i>italic text</i>
italic text

Bold is another fun one:
<b>bold text</b>
bold text

You may also combine them to obtain both bold and italic:
<b><i>Bold, Italic</i></b>
Bold and Italic

Different blogging systems support varying commands, however all of the above are supported by blogger.com, and should be supported by most other systems.
Happy blogging!

Wesley Budrose
(pbudrose@student.nd.edu.au)
Developer for Communitopia

Editors Note: My thanks to Wesley for sharing this information, Tom