I’m slowly learning HTML

I started blogging in the spring of 2007. Pretty early on, I decided that knowing just a little html was useful for fixing my own problems and having a greater sense of how blogs work. Of course, “knowing just a little html” meant that I learned the code for creating links and italicizing <em></em> and bolding text <strong></strong> and that was about it. At this point, I should mention that I feel fairly strongly about the value of learning at least a little about how blogging works behind the scenes. Knowing just a little allows you to experiment more and doesn’t make you as dependent on trusting/relying on the technology. It can also make you look like (more of) a fancy expert (than you actually are). Since 2007, I’ve developed 19 course blogs and co-developed 3 personal ones. (wow, that’s a lot) and I have learned a little bit more html code…slowly and gradually. I’m contemplating making a more serious effort to know the language this year. Still not sure. Anyway, I thought I’d post the most recent code that I learned from STA.

None of this code is earth-shatteringly awesome, but for someone like me, who wants to experiment creatively and critically with blogs but isn’t a html/web developing expert, this code is useful. Maybe it’s useful for you too:

Creating notes (end/footnotes):
Marking note in text: <a href="#note1"id="note1linkback">*</a>
Marking note at end: <a href="#note1linkback"id="note1">*</a>

(I use “note1” to describe the note, but you can use whatever text you want (I think) as long as you’re consistent. Maybe “totallyawesomeandbrilliantthought1”?

To make the text smaller, since it’s a footnote/endnote, just wrap the entire text above with the html for small: <small></small>

I’ve been trying out this new code, on my recent blog posts on “twitter cares,” like this one.

3 thoughts on “I’m slowly learning HTML”

  1. It can be hard to make HTML visible in posts. As STA reminded me, any quotation marks get changed by wordpress in the process of posting. To get around this, you need to type " in place of “.

  2. I’m in the process of trying to learn HTML as well — the last time I touched it was the sixth grade. If you’re interested in digging deeper, w3schools.com is a great resource for HTML and CSS (the latter is very useful for altering presentation of content, like making footnotes appear in subscript).

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