(or, How Can I Use HTML to Make My Post Stand Out?)

To be perfectly honest, all the HTML coding I’ve learned, I’ve googled. That being said, it works just as well for me as it would if I had attended some sort of formal schooling. The point of my initial comment is this: if you want to figure out how to do it, google it!

Here, however, are some basic HTML codes that I use frequently that can make your post pop – and on a class blog, where everyone is posting regularly, being able to have something that draws the eye visually to your post can be a good thing. (That being said, keep in mind that if you don’t write something interesting and engaging, the most innovative and beautiful html coding in the world will not keep your audience reading.)

HTML (HyperText Markup Language, for those who care) codes are always in these brackets < >, and they always have a … let’s think of it as an open and a close, like we say when we’re reading and we want to mark punctuation with open quotes and close quotes. The open would be just the text below (in the triangular brackets), and the close would be the text below with a / in front of it (in the triangular brackets).

In all cases, in the list below, take the spaces out to make it work. (If I leave the spaces in, you’ll see the effect, not the code.)

to bold your work, use b: < b > in front of the text you want to bold and < / b > after it
• to italicize your work, use i: < i > in front of the text you want to italicize and < / i > after it
• to underline your work, use u: < u > in front and < / u > after
• to change the font colour, you need to know what the html code is for the colour you want to use – you can find those here – then use font color= plus the code for the colour (no spaces): so for a shade of blue, I would type < font color = 08298A > at the beginning of the text I wanted to change colour, and < / font color > at the end. You can find a list of the colours and their HTML codes here.
• to make the text bigger, use big: < big > in front and < / big > after
• to make a list, like I am here, use ul to start the list if you want it unordered (with bullet points as is shown here) or ol if you want a numbered list, and then li before each item: < ul > or < ol > at the start of the list, < / ul > or < / ol > at the end of the complete list, with < li > before each item on the list and < / li > after each item
• Finally, to add a link to a website (like I did with the HTML colour one), you use a combination of codes: at the beginning, you use a href, and at the end you use a, but it’s combined differently – do < a href=" and put the full website address, including the http:// part, inside the quotation marks with no spaces "> and then type whatever text you want to appear in your blog; then use < / a > at the end of the text to end the hyperlink. For example, with the one I used above (you would do this with no spaces except for the one between the a and the href), I typed: < a href = " http://html-color-codes.info/ " > here < / a > – and the “here” is the only thing that showed in the actual blog post, but if you click on it, it will go to the link I indicated

For anything else … google it! There’re thousands of things you can do if you want to take the time to learn.