To make your journal entries appear as something other than plain text, you can use some simple HTML tags to spice up the appearance of your postings. While Blurty uses a 'parser' to catch some items in your postings and automatically convert them (Example: recognizing a URL and making that a link when it's presented to a reader, inserting line breaks), other things will require a little bit of effort on your part.
All of the instructions below apply to anywhere you enter your text, whether it's a web browser or one of the stand-alone clients (see http://www.blurty.com/download).
General Guidelines:
HTML, or HyperText Markup Language, is a standardized language (see http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/) for presenting information in a browser. In short, any web server sends a text file to your browser in response to a request (when you click on a link or enter an address in your browser), and your browser then interprets, or 'parses', the HTML, and presents it in a human-readable form with links, images and text embellishments.
You can use any of the following HTML 'tags' within a Blurty posting or comment:
<a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br> <center> <cite> <code> <dd> <div> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <form> <h1> <h2> <h3> <hr> <i> <img> <input> <li> <marquee> <nobr> <ol> <option> <p> <pre> <s> <select> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul> <xmp>
There are many useful tags there that can bring your text to life, but we're only going to cover a few of the basics here. If you want to learn more about these tags, you can visit sites like the "World Wide Web Consortium", the international internet standards body, guide to HTML (http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Guide/) to get a complete guide on how to use them.
These FAQs also have instructions on how to put pictures (http://www.blurty.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=47) and create links (http://www.blurty.com/support/faqbrowse.bml?faqid=16) in your journal.
Most HTML tags must have both an opening and closing tag so, for example, your browser will know when to start and when to stop bolding a particular piece of text. For instance, to center some text, you start with an opening tag, like <center>, type your text, then enter the closing tag, </center>.
Bold:
To make text bold, surround it with the <b> and </b> tags. For example, if you want to write a sentence like "I went to the park today and saw the most beautiful birds", and you want the word 'beautiful' to be bold you would write it in your journal as "I went to the park today and saw the most <b>beautiful</b> birds".
Note that you can also do this for an entire string of words, as the spacing and other punctuation between the tags does not affect the outcome, until you turn off the bold text with the closing (</b>) tag.
Italics:
To make text italicized, just put it between opening and closing italics tags, <i> and </i>. For example, if you wrote the following in your journal:
I met Sean Martin today, and he is <i>very</i> tall.
The word 'very' would appear in italics. Same rule from BOLD, above; you can type as much text as you want between the opening and closing tags.
Center:
Use <center> and </center>. Same usage as the last two, though you must start any text you want centered on a new line to achieve the desired effect.
For example:
<center>All of the text on this line will be centered</center>
Mixing it all up:
You can mix up some HTML tags within the same string of text. For instance, if you wanted the word "great" to appear as both bold and italic in the following sentence - "Blurty is a great tool for keeping a journal and connecting with others", you would write this in your journal as:
Blurty is a <b><i>great</i></b> tool for keeping a journal and connecting with others.
Note that the closing tags went out from the word in the reverse order as they went in. You could write it as <b><i>great</b></i>, and you would achieve the desired effect, but your readers' browsers would interpret and display that word just a little quicker if you close the tags in the reverse order, as shown in the last example.
Preview:
If you choose to use HTML in your comments in other peoples' journals, note that there is a preview button available to you that is not there for a regular post (this is because you can edit posts, but you can't edit your comments, only delete them). You can use this to preview your work as it would appear, with all HTML rendered, when someone goes to view that comment. If you see a problem with the post, you can always go back and edit the entry by pressing the Back button on your browser.
Note, however, that sometimes browsers misbehave a bit and will reload the previous form instead of the page, and all of your work is lost. Before hitting the preview button, put your cursor in the message box and press ctrl-A (or command-a on a Mac) to highlight all of the text, then ctrl-C (or command-C on a Mac) to copy that text to your local clipboard. That way, if your text is lost when you press back after preview, you can paste it back in to the message box and make the corrections.
The Visions Client:
The Blurty client for Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000 also has some quick shortcuts for creating bold, italic and link text:
Ctrl-B - makes the selected text bold by inserting the <b> and </b> tags.
Ctrl-I - makes the selected text italicized by inserting the <i> and </i> tags.
Ctrl-M - brings up a quick wizard for creating a link to a web site, another user's journal or an image.
Other client authors may also include this functionality in their clients. Last Updated:
greentea, 2003-01-07
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