Hyperlinks, italics and other clever stuff

When I started commenting on slugger a number of years ago I was a bit less sad, had a bit more hair and was away from home a lot. Now I am at home every evening, have even less hair, am much more sad and have no closer a relationship with my family. All this is secondary to my involvement with slugger: I appreciate few republicans will have much sympathy, nor many loyalists and probably precious few other people.

Right fishing for compliments over with: on with what I want to say.

We have a number of new commentators and I thought a brief outline of the clever things you can do with you comments might be in order. I was going to say cool things but let us be honest: commenting on slugger is by definition not cool (having one’s own posts is even less cool). If you doubt me try telling a good looking 20 something member of the opposite sex that you spend a lot of time on slugger: see it is not cool.

Slugger (and lots of other blogs) have a code system which allows the clever (uncool) stuff to be done. This relies on the use of brackets: the relevant brackets are the pointy ones > and the opposite one. These are the shift versions of the comma and full stop buttons. Unfortunately I cannot place the brackets in the blog as the computer will then think it is the beginning of a piece of code. As such I will use square brackets to demonstrate ie [ and ].

There is a bit of a convention that when one quotes something another commenter says one puts it in italics. So we will begin with italics:

To italicise something (remember to use pointy brackets not square ones):

Put [i] Then type or paste the comment from your opponent or friend followed by [/i].

You can also make things bold with [strong] and [/strong]

Blockquote: [blockquote] and [/blockquote]

The last clever thing people like doing is links with red words instead of the web address of the link. This requires [a href=”insert the web address you want to link to”]then here type the words you want as the link followed by[/a].

Okay the above has caused problems so we will take it bit at a time:

First type [a href=”
Then paste the web address you want followed by “]
Then type the words you want to be in red
Finally type [/a]

Is that any use? I am happy to revise it if it helps and within reason will try to conduct further explanations using email if needed.

Turgon

This author has not written a biography and will not be writing one.