Barkan's Meta-Blog

Keep them on your blog with a pop-up window for links

2006-09-09T17:10:00.000-07:00

A link is controlled by an a. In particular, it's an <a> and a </a>to close out the link.

Links are in this format (in this example to link to Mr. Brown's blog at URL
http://www.monticohort1.blogspot.com):

<a href="http://www.monticohort1.blogspot.com/" > Mr. Brown's Blog</a>

This produces the following link: Mr. Brown's Blog

If you click on it, your browser window (and your reader) will go to the link, leaving your site.

You can add one simple instruction to this to create a new browser window for the link: target="_blank". This way your blog is still on their desktop and they are viewing the link in a new window.

Add it after the URL (in quotes) that you want them to visit in this format:
<a href="http://www.monticohort1.blogspot.com/" target="_blank"> Brown's Blog in a new window</a>

This produces the following link: Mr. Brown's Blog in a new window. Click on this link and see how a new window pops up.

Big & Small, Red & Blue

2006-08-23T17:16:00.000-07:00

Fonts, fonts, fonts.

The "font" tag is a handy one I learned a few years ago to make simple formatting changes to make your text look boffo! by playing with size and color of the text. It was my intention to share this with you, but I recently learned that the "font" tag was so simple and straightforward to use that it's being discontinued ("deprecated") and replaced by something called "CSS", or style sheets.

The W3 Schools link has a great explanation of the "style" tag and how to use it. Scroll down to "The Right Way to Do It - With Styles" and click on the links for text size and color to learn it "hands on".
For now, ignore the "html" and "body" tags. We'll discuss those in the future.

Finally, a cool thing to try is making your text the same color as the background to make something (initially) invisible, until and unless you know to highlight it with your mouse. Like This! Did you find this? Let me know...
Why would you want to do this?
To hold back some information at first glance. A common use is in movie reviews to hide the "spoilers" (things you may not want revealed to you before you see the movie). Like this: In the movie "The Sixth Sense", Bruce Willis is already dead and doesn't know it. Yup, that's why they call it a spoiler. Sorry if you were planning on seeing it and I just ruined it for ya.

Don't Fear html!

2006-08-17T10:32:00.000-07:00

Most web pages are written in or include coding written in html (hyper-text markup language). There are a few simple commands in html that you can easily incorporate into your blog, but it helps to understand a couple of the "grammar" rules that make it work.

The first thing to know is tags. Html is all about tags:
"So what are all these "<" and ">" things doing here? When you place a certain thing within these you are making something known as a tag. For example the tag is saying to start bold text, and the tag is saying to stop bold text. The tag with the slash (/) is known as the closing tag. Many opening tags require a following closing tag, but not all do. Tags make up the entire structure of an HTML document. "

try this: take a sentance you wrote on your blog and insert the bold tag as described above to highlight one of the words.

e-mail blogging feature

2006-08-17T07:33:00.000-07:00

I e-mailed this item to my blog!
In the blog control panel, Click on "Settings", then on "Email", and fill in something you'll remember for the Mail-to-Blogger Address. Just send your posting to that e-mail address and it's published!

I added the picture later. More on that in a future entry