COM 337: Class blog addresses

As soon as you've opened your blog, you need to let the rest of us know your address. So I've set up a handy-dandy place you can do that. It's this post. Here are the steps:

1. Go down to the end of this post where it says "posted by Pete # 3:20 PM 0 comments" (except the number of comments will change as you follow the rest of the instructions), and click on where it says "___ comments." That will open up the comment field.

2. In the comment field, write a message telling us what you're naming your blog and creating a link to it (which is why the number of comments will change, but you've figured that out already so I don't need to tell you, right)?

Here's how you do a link. You'll have to use the angle brackets, the keys that look like "less than" and "greater than" from math class that you'll find as the shift of the comma and the period on your keyboard. Stuff that's enclosed in angle brackets is called an HTML "tag." (And HTML is short for Hypertext Markup Language. But I'll bet you already knew that, too.)

3. Start your link by entering <a href=" Then copy your blog's address (or URL) from the "Address" field on your browser and paste it in right after the quote mark. Follow it with another "> so it looks something like this <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com"> all run together with no spaces.

4. Next you need some text that you highlight so it'll take readers to your blog when they click on it. That's called hypertext. If you're doing this for the first time, it's easiest to say something like: Click here for the link. And highlight the word "here." It'll look like this: Click <a href="yourblog.blogspot.com">here</a> for link.

5. Make sure you put your address in the message. Just type it in normally without any of the angle brackets.

You may get all of this right the first time. You may not. (Don't feel bad if you don't! Just keep trying.) Pretty quickly, you'll get used to it. And it's an important thing to know because you'll be doing a lot of linking on your blogs as you get under way.

Once you've made the link, save the comment to this blogpost and make a note of the headline, the date, the permalink address of this post or whatever. We'll be coming back to it.

So the next time you're sitting at a bar and you notice somebody next to you staring into their beer and muttering "angle bracket a space href equals quote URL quote angle bracket," you'll understand why. Buy 'em a round. They may need it.