Ok … blogs allow you to put all sorts of stuff in your stories and comments but you may have to get your hands dirty with a little bit of HTML… don‘t worry it’s really easy!

OK first up the basics … HTML consists of tags that is something like ; each tag has a partner ( in the last case ). There are a few exceptions but we'll come to that later.

In order to format some text you have to enclose your text with tags so if I want bold text, I use: Here is some bold text - this will come out like this: Here is some bold text

It is exactly the same for italic text but using i instead of b. You can nest tags eg:

Here is some bold italic text

Note that the i tags are BOTH inside the b tags; they can be either way round but they need to be matched.

Some exceptions:

• - new paragraph

• 
  - line break

• ---

  - horizontal rule

Each of these doesn't need an end tag (although it is good practice and will increasingly be required to use an end tag with

.

Hyperlinks: These are formed by using the tag, with it's end tag - the only difference is that the URL that you want to link to goes inside the tag - eg:

There are a couple of things it is worth mentioning here: href is the link, this needs to start with http:// if the browser is to understand it as a link external to the site. Also if you want to open a new window with the link use “target” eg: … "_blank" means a new window.