Okay, if you got this far, you have created a blog, learned about blog and post addresses, along with configuring blog settings for your identity, commenting, and for other blog features.
Now I'm going to spend some time talking about creating content in the blog, exploring different features that make blog posts fun and useful. And I'm going to start with LINKS because links are what make the Internet a perfect space for learning. There's always more you can learn, and a good blog post will have links to lead people to learn more.
Link Text
Instead of just pasting the raw webpage address into a post, it's much better to create a link with link text that lets readers know where the link is going to take them. So, whenever you want to create a link, type the link text, and then highlight that link then. Then, click on the Link label/icon in the text editor. Blogger is currently rolling out this new mobile-friendly version of the editor, but lots of people (like me) are still using the Blogger Classic editor, I'll try to remember to document both the old and the new editor versions with screenshots (leave me a comment if you notice I've failed to do that):
Old version:
New version:
The new editor actually prompts you whether you are creating a link to an external webpage or an internal link (anchor) inside your post; so you'll need to choose create/edit URL for an external link:
Link Address
Then, you will see a dialogue box where you can paste in the address for the link:
Old version:
New version:
And now you have a link! If you are in the habit of making lots of links (like me), then you can use the keyboard shortcut Control-K in most web browsers: highlight the text, click Control-K, and that will take you straight to the link creation dialogue box.
NOW....... create a post: make links! Did you figure out a kind of blog project to use for this Blog Fest? Add a new post now, and make sure it includes some links. My project is curating some Twitter highlights each day, so of course those posts are full of links because I am linking to specific Twitter posts and/or Twitter accounts, and sometimes also to the content that I've learned about at Twitter. Here is my project: Twitter Highlights.
Next up: images in blog posts (probably my favorite thing about blogging!).
