How to add links

If you've followed any of my blogs for any amount of time then you know that I love links. I link to other blogs, I link to websites I like, I link to stories I've read, I even put links in my comments sometimes.

Today I'd like to tell you two ways to improve your linky love.

The first is how to open your links in a new window. I always try to do this because I don't want people to lose my blog while they wander off to check out my links.

Say I want to link to my Happy At Home blog...

Go ahead, click it. I'll wait here...

Back? Yay! What I did was add a line to my HTML that makes that link open in a new window. After I highlighted the words "Happy At Home blog", I clicked the Link button up there on the top of this post. It looks like a world with a chain link over it. (I'm sure most of you know how to link things but I'm trying to write these tips as if you know NOTHING about this stuff...please ignore me if you already know what I'm talking about :D )

Then I went to the little tab that says Edit Html.

Where I added the link it looks like this:

Say I want to link to my (<)a href="http://katshappyathome.blogspot.com/">Happy At Home blog(<)/a>

*Remember that the red parenthesis are not a part of the code. I have to put them to show you the code.*

To make that link open in another page, I'm going to add the following code:

(there is a space here) target="_blank"

So now my code looks like this:

Say I want to link to my (<)a href="http://katshappyathome.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">Happy At Home blog(<)/a>

Ta Da! Your link now opens in a new window and your original post is still open for people to go back to :)

The other linky love I wanted to show you today is how to put links into your comments. I'm sure you've seen people leave links in comments. Sometimes they leave links to their blogs so that you can find them. I like to use it to link back to a specific post, like if I gave you an award or something like that.

Here's my example comment:

Hi! I wanted to show off some of the new blogs I'm following. To see them click HERE.

Or you can visit me on any of my blogs. They are Happy At Home, This Crazy Adventure I Call Life, Blog Love and The Eat Food NOT Money Cookbook. Thanks!

Now I know that's a lot of links for one comment and I probably wouldn't put that many links in one comment BUT if I wanted to all I'd have to do is add the following code to each part I wanted links added to:

(<)a href="the URL I want to link to">The words I want linked(<)/a>

You notice I did NOT put the target="_blank" code. That's because most comment sections won't accept that HTML.

So the first line of my comment would look like this before it was published:

Hi! I wanted to show off some of the new blogs I'm following. To see them click (<)a href="http://katsbloglove.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-love.html">HERE(<)/a>

I suggest that when you add a link to a comment, you preview it before you publish it. Especially if you are commenting on a blog that uses comment moderation. That way you can make sure it looks right before it disappears. And don't forget to not include the red parenthesis!

That's about it for today :) Hopefully I'll see y'all tomorrow! Happy Friday everyone!