Thursday, February 18, 2010

A quick HTML tip for my 40k friends

Hello everyone!

Afraid that I don't have anything in the way of 40K this week. I have just started school for web/program development. Its pretty demanding as far as time is concerned leaving me to look wistfully on my minis in passing.
HOWEVER! I can still contribute to the FTW blogging community by sharing what I learn in class with you.

Today's quick tip will focus on placing links in your site. Do you ever notice that when you use the link tool at the top of the txt editor in Blogger that it opens the link in the same window? It may not be a big deal for some of you but for me I like to make multiple links referring to other sites or pictures. If you constantly have to move back and forth it breaks the flow of the blog. Now, with a simple trick in the "edit html" tab it will open a new window allowing your readers to access the content at their leisure.



  • Make sure your text box is on the Edit Html tab

  • Create a link within your blog ( I am going to use GOOGLE )


    • Now you can do this one of two ways either do it by hand (which after this example you will know how to) or highlight the word you want to link and click the link button at the top



  • It should look something like this:



    • < a href="http://www.google.com">GOOGLE < /a >




  • In actual HTML there will be no spaces between the <> symbols and the a


  • after the command line href="http://www.google.com" add target="_blank" ( no spaces between www.google.com" and target)


  • It will look like this < href="http://www.google.com" target="_blank">





With that one simple addition you can go from this to this

If you have any questions feel free to email me. I really dig playing around with this stuff and any challenges/problems you may come up with will help me troubleshoot.

Have a good one
GV

4 comments:

  1. Very cool. Thanks for the tip! Would there be a different command to open in a new tab? I run Chrome at home, so it does it automatically, but at work, I'm stuck on IE...

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  2. Not that I am aware of, I just got started this week though so there very well may be. The way I understand it now is that it just requests a new "something" and that the browser then determines what it is going to be. I'll ask my mentor tonight and see what I can find out for certain though.

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  3. Great post. I think simple links like this are great ways to spruce up our pages and make for a better community altogether.

    As for opening new windows on people, while it may help those that are new, the concensus from web developers I know seems to be that it is bad form to open a link in a new window or tab with your links. Though it seems groovy, users can very easily open links either way should they want to, so presuming they'll want to open a link one way and not another isn't ideal. Of course, for less experienced browsers who don't know how to do either, it could be a nice treat.

    As for Ghengis' question, I don't believe it's possible to code a link to behave like this. Tabs behave differently in different browsers, so it would require different code. That said, if you want to set your personal browser to open "new windows" into "new tabs" that's easy to do.

    Anywho, thanks for the post. I'm sure it will benefit many of our fellow bloggers. :)

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  4. @Warhammer39999 thank you for the insight on that. After seeing it spelled out in black and white I can see how it could be frustrating to force a decision on a viewer.

    I mainly do it because I don't like posting pictures that I don't have rights to. I am still a little uncertain as to the rights/procedures so I compensate (probably overmuch) with links to the sites/pics themselves.

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