Wednesday, February 12, 2014

Hyperlinks

Linking is one of the biggest parts of blogging. I figure that I would add a post on linking. Let's add an <a></a> HTML tag to your blog. The basic <a> tag is this: It includes an <a> open tag and an </a> closing tag. Here is some text: Visit our social media Google+ page. To make this a hyper-link, we need to use the <a></a> tag. The <a></a> tag consists of a reference, title, and (optional) a target.

Here's how it works:

Visit our social media media <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/106263980696246227305" title="SOC 6903" target="_blank">Google+</a> page.

Visit our social media Google+ page

In this example, I added a hyperlink. Here is the basic syntax: <a href="" title="" target=""></a>
This has to be added in the HTML section of your blog. The href is the url to which you want to navigate; the title is what is shown when you hover over the link, SOC 6903 in the example above; and the target is optional and usually tells the link to open in the _parent window or a _blank tab or window.

This is very helpful when you want to keep the flow of the paragraph without interruptions from weird hyperlinks like https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/106263980696246227305.
Alternatively, you can use the hyperlink tool "Link" in the toolbar. This is probably the best way to accomplish this, but if you ever get into trouble, I hope understanding the mechanics of this will help out. Google+. You'll notice that the same options are available for this tool except for the title option.

Thursday, February 6, 2014

"Narrate, Curate, Share"

I've actually heard these terms in conjunction before. "Narrate, Curate, Share" does a great job at depicting the true meaning of what blogging is all about. Aron Barlow wrote a book on this same subject, and the idea that you are a storyteller as a blogger resonates through his book; you are a storyteller in the new public sphere. As a curator, you begin to think about what your writings can do to the individuals who read them; you think, essentially, about how your writing and thought affect people and life. It is important to state that the connectedness is, in fact, the basic premise of social media, of which blogging shared a big part in by sharing.