Something useful

After both Ocean and Shari posted here saying that they were still learning how to blog (like I’m not!), I thought I’d respond to Ocean’s request to do a little ‘How To’ post here and there about blogging. Here’s a useful lesson to enhance your blog … how to open up stuff in a new window.

I’m not sure how many of you use the Edit HTML tab in your Posting – Create section but I use it all the time. Here it is here:

I don’t know a ton of HTML but I know the basics, and I sometimes find writing in HTML easier and faster than using the formatting buttons at the top of the posting creation window. You may love using those buttons for the basics like bolding and italicizing, and that’s OK. But it’s also useful to know a teeny tiny bit of HTML to do things that the formatting buttons can’t do for you.

You know the button in that row that you use to make a link? The one that looks like a globe with sort of a figure eight thing on top of it? Here it is here:

That button is fine and dandy to use to create a link that opens the link up in the same window as your blog when people click on it, but what if you don’t want the link to open up in the same window? I often think it’s nicer to have a link open up in an additional window, so the window with your blog open in it is still open when people are done looking at the other thing you’ve linked to. Call me crazy, but I think it’s a good thing not to drive viewers away from your blog to something else.

So how do you do that?

OK, let’s say you want to link to my blog, Shades of Bliss. Well, if you use that little globe-thingy link button on the formatting bar to make your link and then you go and find that section in the text in the Edit HTML tab where you’ve done that, the text in HTML will look like this:

<a href=”www.shadesofbliss.blogspot.com”>Shades of Bliss</a>

To add in something to make the link open up in a new window, you want the code to look like this:

<a href=”http://www.shadesofbliss.blogspot.com&#8221; target=blank>Shades of Bliss</a>

What’s the difference? The “target=blank” text. Add that in to your links after the second quote which surrounds the URL that you’re linking to and – voila! – that link will open up in a new window. (It splits across the lines here, but it doesn’t have to … just put a space in between the last quotation mark and the ‘t’ in ‘target’.)

Want to copy what I’ve got above and put it in your own blog? Replace the “http://www.shadesofbliss.blogspot.com&#8221; text above with the URL you want to link to. Then replace the “Shades of Bliss” text (in between the tags) with the text that you want to be the link in your document.

Happy linking!

Too hard to start? Let me know!