Blog Goodies » Making a Link in Blogger

I think I sorta frustrated my mom with teaching her how to add links to a blog. I sorta feel the same way sometimes when I try to edit some Java or PHP with little to no experience at it.

Hopefully this makes it easier for my mom…

This tutorial assumes you have a blogger account and want to create a link in Blogger. Don’t have a Blogger account and want one? Get one at Blogger.com

I would go through a Blogger sign up tutorial, but the process is fairly self explanatory I think, starting right off on the home page where from where they have this sign up image

Why are links so important? The web is primarily a series of text documents and links…everything else builds on that.

The code for a link looks like this:
anchor text

General things to know about HTML elements:

• most every HTML element starts off with a < symbol
• most every HTML element ends with a > symbol.
• some tags (like breaks or images) can be self closing

Thigs specific to links:

• Links have to do two things:
1. give a clue as to what they are about (using anchor text or equivalent
2. point to where you want to send people when they click the link
• Anchor text is the text in the blue thing that you click on…it is what helps describe what the link is about.

Lets practice making a link in Blogger.

Step 1: know where you want to link at

Step 2: copy that URL to notepad or some other convenient location

Step 3: think of what context you want to describe the link in

Now that you know where you want to point and how you want to describe it there are three main ways to make links in Blogger. You can use the blog this button, make a link from the compose mode, or make a link from the Edit HTML mode. Lets run through how to do each.

BlogThis:
The Google Toolbar has a button which allows you to blog right from the desktop without having to leave the page you want to talk about.

Step 1: Download the toolbar

Step 2: Click on the the Google logo on the left side of the toolbar

and scroll through the drop down to the word options.

Step 3: Click on the word options. It should bring up an options popup.

In that popup click the more tab at the top and it should bring you to this screen

Click the BlogThis box and and hit ok.

Step 4: Your toolbar should have a blog this button on it.

Step 5: visit a page you want to blog about and highlight some of the text on a page by scrolling over the text with the left mouse button down.

Step 6: after you highlight the text let go of the left mouse button and move the mouse up to the blog this button

and click the blog this button

Step 7: clicking the blog this button should bring up a pop up screen that looks like

Notice how I highlighted the post title and save as draft buttons. You probably want to change the post title to something unique to you and add your opinion of why the part you quoted was blogworthy.

Step 8: save the post as a draft by clicking the button in the lower left corner of the pop up.

Step 9: When you go to Blogger.com and log in

you can then go to your blog page, click on your blog name

Step 10: the post that you saved as a draft should have draft off to the right side of the screen

on the left side it will have the date in green as well as an edit button.

Click the edit button and edit your file to change its title, spruce up it’s format, etc. then hit the publish button.

If you do not wish to use the BlogThis feature or would rather write your posts from scratch you can use the compose mode or the view HTML mode to make your posts. Next up is the compose mode.

Compose Mode:
After you log in to blogger it gives you the option to compose a new blog post using the green plus sign pictured below.

In compose mode

Google tries to make blogging simple by hiding away the HTML code.

This means you will not see anything like the source code of what a link looks like. While they make everything look simpler in compose mode when you create a link the real source code looks like this:

But don’t worry about that because they make it so you don’t have to see that sort of stuff if you don’t want to.

The first step in making a link is to write whatever text you want to post on. Then highlight the text you want to make a link out of by scrolling over it with your left mouse button.

After you highlight the text you want to use to make a link (also known as anchor text) then go ahead and click the make link button. It has some green in it and looks like it has a chain link on it

clicking the make link button will bring up a pop up

In that pop up you need to enter where you want the link to point people at.
Typically that link would be an address like http://www.bloggoodies.com/, although sometimes they can look even a bit more funky than that by linking at a page location on a site, so maybe it would be something like http://www.bloggoodies.com/blogs-and-press-releases.

So now you type in where you want the link to point at

then you hit the OK button

you just made a link. it should have a blue line under it.

Please note that sometimes when you create links in the compose mode that you need to ensure you have the words surrounding the link a bit away from the link, otherwise when you space over it could extend your link out.

The key to fighting that extending link is to not use the space bar to move over, but to use the arrow keys to move past the link

and then arrow back the other way towards the link and hit the space bar to make a space.

Edit HTML Mode:
lets switch from compose mode

to Edit HTML mode by clicking on the edit html button

here we get to play with the source code.

Lets break the link down to its simplest formats to make this easy to learn. Links start off with something like this

and then they have something like this at the end

if we put them together with anchor text between them we get something like this

but that does not have the location the link is pointing at, so lets add a link location

now lets replace the word location with the real place we want to point the link at

you just made a link. Please note that your anchor text does not have to use the words anchor text in it. It can have whatever text you like.

If you flip back to compose mode

you will see your link with a blue underline.

You can put it in a sentence

and move it around for formatting

if you need to.

hopefully that helped ya mom