Add a comment to someone's blog

The ELTAS Tech Tools Day includes a workshop for online newbies introducing the basics of online communication. Those first steps can be daunting, and plenty of great teachers are a bit afraid of taking them. Here are a few

Pre-task questions:

Q: Why should I comment on a blogpost? I can send that person an email if I know them and really want to say something. And if I don't know them, isn't commenting just showing off?
A: This is a question of the changing culture in our profession. I look forward to a lively discussion with you!

Q: If I post a comment to a blogpost I have read online, the page looks different and the interface asks me to identify myself in some way, sometimes type in some letters from a visual code (a captcha, right?) or even add my email address. Won't I get lots of spam if I type in my email address?
A: No. Your email address is only published to the blogger and is visible only in the blogger's backend, the admin area. Seeing your email address tells the blogger that your entry is not spam to his or her blog. Since spam is a fact of life, though, you should activate spam filters on your email account(s) anyway.

Q: I wrote a comment, but it didn't show up when I looked at the blog. Why?
A: The first time you comment on a blog, it is put on hold. The blogger has to allow comments by you first. Patience is sometimes needed, as some bloggers do have a life, I've been told.

Q: I want to add a link to my comment. How do I do it?
A: Just copy and paste the link into the interface (include the http:// at the beginning!). Will it show up as a hyperlink?

1. Only if the comments function has a built-in converter from Rich Text (the formatted text) to HTML (the code that runs the websites). Some blogs do, some don't.
   
2. If your link doesn't show up as a hyperlink after you post it, don't worry. Next time, try adding the necessary HTML code to create a hyperlink. Here's a simple HTML table, and your HTML code for hyperlinks is at the bottom on the left:

Q: Can you just run through the whole process?
A: Yep. Here's a video.

Video made with Jing, a great screen capture tool.

Task:
Add a comment to a blog.... for instance, to this post!
Take the challenge and add a hyperlink to your comment!
For example, can you share a site you like to go to for teaching ideas?

HTML first tags

HTML may look daunting at first glance, but it's quite logical once you get your head around the idea of tags, which decline and fall explained so well. The opening tag comes in pointed brackets and the closing one has pointed brackets and a slash. Put in "b" and the text becomes bold, "i" is for italics, "p" stands for paragraph and "br" for break. At a glance:



Add the code for tables and you're almost there.

Getting it up (2) - learning about HTML

Last time (Getting it up (1) – simple ways to start a web presence) we talked about easy ways to get a basic website online. If you want to go beyond basic, you need to learn a bit about html. Writing html documents is in no sense rocket science. But it's a bit like setting off fireworks: nothing to it, but things can go disatrously wrong for no obvious reason.

The best introductory book I've found - by miles- is this one:

If you're a teacher, you'll find their way of presenting information somewhere between thought-provoking and inspiring. I did, anyway.

Here's the link to the book at amazon.de: Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML.

And here's the link to amazon.co.uk, where it's a lot cheaper at the moment cos the pound is not very well: Why do I need to learn about html? And what's CSS?

When you call up a web page, the server at the website sends text to your browser, formatted as html. HTML is text with a few added comments inside pointy brackets. The comments are called "tags" and they look like "<h1>", "<p>", "<i>" etc., to tell the browser to format a bit of text as a main heading, a paragraph, or in italics. The killer tag is the "<a>" one, which marks a bit of text as a hyperlink to another page. Think about how it's changed your life, and agree with me that it's one of the towering achievements of the human intellect, right up there with moveable type and cricket. And it's British. (And hence currently under American control.)

So it's just text with tags, like this:

In that case, why is it so tricky?

The problem is: when you write, say, a Word document, you know pretty much how it's going to look for anyone who puts it on their screen or prints it out. But an internet server doesn't send a formatted html document: it sends the text with tags saying "this next bit is a heading /paragraph / list / table etc." or "put a border round this picture". Then the software (browser) on the computer of the person who called up your webpage puts it on the screen in the way that the software decides will look nicest. So an html page looks different on a PC, a MAC, a big desktop screen, a "beamer" projector, a laptop, a little netbook computer, a Blackberry, a mobile phone, your next television, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera ... Then people can resize their windows, resize the text in a window, and generally muck up your pages even if they look all right when they first arrive on their screens. And when you've written tidy pages that look nice on all current systems and browsers, somebody issues a new browser that scrambles them.

Things are sorting themselves out a bit. The current approach is to keep html for the structure of the text (headings, paragraphs, lists etc.) and put all the style things (fonts, colours, backgrounds, boxes etc.) is a separate file using a separate system: a "style sheet", which is the "SS" in "CSS" (the "C" is for "cascading", but isn't as cool as it sounds). This system sort of works. Mostly. Ish.

So the thing is, you'll never make web pages of any complexity if you don't understand at least a bit about what's going on. The book above is great for explaining this.

Next: the trouble with browsers, and the programs you can use ( and can't) to help you write html that works. Mostly.