HTML for Garden Geeks

Poncirus trifoliata ‘Flying Dragon’

Image courtesy of Landscapedia.info

The web has been made so "consumer-friendly" that my friend Alyson, who is a web producer for a major media company, told me that the new web producers don't even know how to edit basic web pages to create the image to the right.  Holy crap!

So if web professionals don't know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), then what are the chances a blogger will know the language this web page is written in?  Why would you even want to know?

The reason you need to know is that on occassion, you will need to either fix a problem or make some custom formatting that isn't point and click.

There are very long books on teaching yourself HTML that are dry as toast. I'm going to teach you just enough HTML so that your friends will think you are genius, but not enough that you'll get bored. Besides, your blog software will probably take care of 99% of your formatting needs.

If you want to see how your blog is formatted in HTML, go to the top of your browser, select View -> Page Source (or similar function depending on browser). This will open up the page to give you the raw text - content, formatting, etc. Go ahead. Don't be scared.

If you took one look and said, "Yeah, ok, it's an header tag followed by meta information, then onto the body tag", you don't really need to read this, so go watch some TV. Otherwise, it probably looked like a mash of words that resembled English but not anything that made sense.

We are going to break things out so you can add, link and format a simple image. Then we are going to add a formatted caption to it. By the end of the lessons, you'll have the image above.

Here is what you will need to get started:
    - 1 new draft blog post

Yep, that's it. In part 2, I'll explain how web pages know what to display along with the basics for our sample above.