Maybe you've wondered why you ever needed to know any HTML. But for this class, you'll have to learn at least one HTML tag, the one for making hyperlinks.
It's easy to learn. Check it out:
<a href=""></a>
is the tag itself without any information in it. Within the quotes, you'll put the URL, or web address, for the site which you want to link to. In between the ><, you'll put the text you want displayed on the screen.
For example, the URL for Slashdot is http://slashdot.org. And if you want to make the word Slashdot a link in a sentence to the website in a blog post, type in,
<a href="http://slashdot.org">Slashdot</a> is a well known community blog site.
To get
Slashdot is a well known community blog site.
HTML is picky and it's easy to make a careless mistake. Don't include any extra spaces in the HTML tag. Make sure that you include "http://" as a part of your web address. In fact, one of the easiest ways to make sure that you get the URL correct is to copy and paste it from the address bar of a browser window currently displaying the page. You may need to use keyboard shortcuts such as CTRL-C (copy) or CTRL V (paste).
Remember: avoid merely posting the URL as a link, such as
http://cyberdash.net/enc110142/index.php
Notice how this doesn't convey much information. Better to have put the page or site title (often found either on the page or in the window bar at the top) or link to part of your text (think of the examples in this site). At the same time, really long URL's won't word wrap at the end of a line. They may cause problems with the way that text is displayed on blog sites and other web pages.
For an additional example on creating hyperlinks, see Webmonkey's Links. To learn more about HTML in general, go through The HTML Basics tutorial at Webmonkey.
Additional HTML commands can be used within the body of your postings. For example,
<b>Here's how you do bold.</b>
Here's how you do bold.
<i>Here's how you do italics.</i>
Here's how you do italics.