How does a blog work?
there are different
kinds of blogs, varying in level of difficulty to manage. you can run
a blog off your own server OR you can run it through a service. the
latter option is far easier for beginning bloggers. a blogging client
allows you to type your text, format it, and publish it to the web in
just a matter of mouse clicks.
Where can you get a blog?
there are many blog
services available but for our purposes, we'll look at some of these:
Tools of the trade
Blogs are about three things
Text
the blogging client
you choose will probably feature text formatting tools. in other words,
you will be able to highlight your text and click on bold or
italics. however, if you don't have a formatting tool OR if you
just want to speed things up, here are simple HTML codes for text formatting:
- bold: <B>text</B>
- italics: <I>text</I>
- line break: text<BR>
- paragraph: text<P>
- horizontal line: text<HR>
Links
similar to formatting,
your blogging client may feature a tool that changes text into a hyperlink.
you would highlight a word or phrase, click on the hyperlink tool, and
enter the URL you want the reader to link to.
in case you don't have
a hyperlink tool or do not wish to use one, the HTML code is as follows:
<A HREF="enter
your link address">text</A>
if you want the link
to open automatically in a new window:
<A HREF="enter your
link address" TARGET="_BLANK">text</A>
Images
with a few exceptions,
most blog sites do not provide space for your images. so, if you want
to put an image on your blog, you will first have to have already secured
space for that image on a server. you can look into using geocities.com,
angelfire.com, Yahoo!Photos and other services that provide free
webspace.
if your image is already
uploaded to a server OR if you want to 'steal' an image that you found
elsewhere on the web, you can use the following HTML code to place the
image on your blog:
<IMG SRC="insert
image address here">
the image's address
will look something like
http://www.geocities.com/tabby1980/landscape.jpg
to insert this image
into a blog entry, you would simply type the following in your post:
<IMG SRC="http://www.geocities.com/tabby1980/landscape.jpg">
it's best not to insert
images to your blog greater than 100k in size. the bigger your images,
the longer it takes for them to load when a reader goes to your blog.
now, what if you don't
know the image's address?
most web browsers will
allow you to find out the image address (or "URL") as follows. surf
to the site that has the image you want. right-click on the image and
select 'Properties'. this results in a window popping up which will
give you the image URL.
finally, if you'd like
your image to link to something else, there isn't much more to it:
<A HREF="address
of some webpage"><IMG SRC tag></A>
When you insert the
address of your image, you get:
<A HREF="www.cnn.com"><IMG
SRC="http://www.geocities.com/tabby1980/landscape.jpg"></A>
thus, your blog entry
would include a photo ("landcape.jpg") that links to a website ("cnn.com").
