Below are some posting guidelines intended to assist our Blog writers - and it may also help those who wish to make comments to posts. If you use versions of the Windows Internet Explorer as your internet browser, there's no great need to study them: IE shows some buttons when you post to the Blog that insert font/text changes automatically.
It may well be a good idea to bookmark this page as a handy guideline to sending your posts to the Blog.
Web pages use 'tags', they are the container commands that tell text what to look like. There is always a beginning tag and an end tag, and they are inserted in 'angle brackets', the "<" and ">" brackets.
Bold text
<strong> and </strong>
<strong>This makes text bold</strong>
Text as italics
<em> and </em>
<em>these tags make this text italics</em>
Clickable hyperlinks
<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com" onclick="this.target='_blank'"> and </a>
<a href="http://www.yourdomain.com" onclick="this.target='_blank'">This is linked text</a>
Notes
The links work great, but the remark onclick="this.target='_blank'" will NOT work in a COMMENT, it's only used in articles.
Replace everything between the quotation marks, i.e. http://www.yourdomain.com , with the complete internet address.
The section onclick="this.target='_blank'" in this tag ensures that a new window opens on people's computers, when people click this link to open the page linked to it.
Don't forget the quotation marks: your link will not work if you forget to place them correctly!
"Funny" characters
People who prepare posts in Word for Windows, be aware: there are some funny characters, that are, in the language of websites, "illegal". These are 'curly quotes' and 'curly apostrophies', as well as 'long dashes'. You can avoid these characters by preparing your posts not in Word for Windows, but in the little windows program called Notepad. Here they are:
curly double quotes: “ and ” : replace with " and "
curly single quotes: ‘ and ’ : replace with ' and '
angled single quotes: ` and ´ : replace with ' and '
curly apostrophies: ´ : replace with '
long dashes: — : replace with - or --
Summaries of posts
Not suitable for Blog comments!
<span class="fullpost"> and </span>
This set of tags is specifically made for the Blog. They enable you to create a short introduction which will appear on the main Blog page, while your entire article or post gets posted in full on its own page. This prevents the main Blog page from becoming too large for visitors.
Start your post with an introductory paragraph or summary of your post or article, and use the tags below around the remainder of your post. Do not leave a space between the introduction and the next paragraph: just start on the next line.
<span class="fullpost">Like so, just replace this sentence with the rest of your post or article, but wrap the beginning and end tags around its text.</span>