Blogging School

I thought I’d take a break from normal posting today and share something useful instead. When I started blogging, I noticed that some people included basic text formatting in their comments. Later, I saw embedded, clickable links, where the commenter didn’t just paste the link as text. So, I decided to find out how to do those things, too. Since I had to go looking for the information, I thought I’d share it in case any of my readers wanted to know, too.

Since web pages are built on HTML coding, that means we can add HTML “tags”, or instructions for how text should appear, to comments. We can use these tags to make type appear bold, italic, bold italic, etc. However, it’s important to remember that not all blogging comments systems accept tags (Typepad is one that doesn’t seem to, for example). For those that do, here are some basic tags:


To use them, you type the tag you want, type the text you want formatted, then type the closing tag. It’s really that simple.

Now suppose you want to include a link to an article, a post on your own blog or a relevant website. First, it’s important to remember that including a link may make your comment look like spam to the blogging software, so keep it to one or two links. Second, not all commenting systems allow links (mostly because of spam problems).

For this example, we’ll assume links are allowed, and that we wanted to link to Google News in the comment. A tag like this would do it:

In this example, the phrase “the Google News page” would be the link. You can make the link say anything you want, but keep in mind that not all commenting systems make links obvious, so on those blogs you may want to use a phrase like “click here”. Also, whatever you type before that link won’t be part of the link. So, in this example, you could type: “For the latest news stories, you can go to” [here is where you place that link above]. What you’d end up with is this:

For the latest news stories, you can always go to the Google News page

Feeling like you want to be really advanced? How about adding a tag so the link will open in a new window or tab? Normally, if someone clicks on a link it’ll open in the same window/tab, replacing what they’re looking at, but by adding a little more code you can make it open in a new window/tab (depending on the browser the reader is using). So, using the same example, it would look like this:

Many blog comments systems don’t permit a target tag—Blogger doesn’t for example—and again the reason is because of spam. But if you use it on your own blog posts, you can make sure that the reader won’t accidentally leave your site just because they clicked on a link. That improves the chances that they’ll read more on your site. WordPress and other blogging software makes this really easy, but Blogger doesn’t: You have to edit the HTML for your post and enter the last part, target=_blank/", manually (space before the word "target"). This is what I did to the Google News link I have above (the one in the text, not one of the pictures).

So, that’s it—just a few things I learned and thought I’d share for others who don’t know them. Feel free to try them out in the comments to this post if you want, and have fun—that’s kind of the whole point of blogging, after all.