Blogging For Dummies®, 4th Edition

Appendix B

Very Basic HTML Code

On a blog, code can mean many things. It can refer to the complicated programming that makes up the software that runs your blog, or it can mean simple styles that make written words look cool when displayed on your blog. In this appendix, you can find out how to make the text in your blog posts look like a million bucks. (Leave the blogging software code to the experts.)

The code that you’re working with affects only a given blog post; the blog software itself builds the blog pages. So, you don’t have to know very many pieces of code — just the code commonly used to format text and photos, or to insert video files.

Most of the code that you need to format your blog posts is HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

Documents formatted by using HTML really consist of nothing but text, which your Internet browser can read and then display. HTML code tells your browser all kinds of things, such as how the text on the screen should be aligned and what text links to what web page. You can easily use HTML. With a few exceptions, each bit of code, or tag, includes opening and closing elements, which surround the content that you want to affect. A few tags are standalone elements that you insert in only one spot. With HTML, you basically use code to mark up text, photos, and other elements.

Adding Headings, Paragraphs, and Line Breaks

You generally want to break ...