Greetings, Cranky Users! Do you long to comment in your BFF's diary with some little ♥♥♥♥♥s? Have a π fight or ∞ mojo? ¿Ask a question in Spanish? Or observe that e = mc² or that cookies are baked at 350°? Let's dive past the squiggle and waste a little time on Friday looking at something completely frivolous!
To get these cute little symbols, you can, of course, copy and paste them from this diary or elsewhere. But you can also create them yourself by using codes that get sandwiched between an ampersand and a semicolon. Here's an online table of the codes, but I've put some of the more amusing ones right here. NOTE that I've inserted a space between the ampersand and the rest of the code, so that you can see the code and not the character it creates -- remove the space to get the character.
♥ |
& hearts; |
¢ |
& cent; |
¡ |
& iexcl; |
♠ |
& spades; |
€ |
& euro; |
¿ |
& iquest; |
♣ |
& clubs; |
£ |
& pound; |
° |
& deg; |
♦ |
& diams; |
¥ |
& yen; |
π |
& pi; |
◊ |
& loz; |
© |
& copy; |
¹ |
& sup1; |
• |
& bull; |
™ |
& trade; |
² |
& sup2; |
∞ |
& infin; |
® |
& reg; |
³ |
& sup3; |
Now, what other easy things can we do with html? We know we can use it to
make mistakes cross things out, by surrounding the text with tags <s> and </s> OR <del> and </del> -- this replaces the shortcut of surrounding the words with hyphens, which no longer works in DK4. So this: <s>crossout</s> gives us this:
crossout. And that's the deal with html, in which I am certainly no expert. It's called "hypertext markup language" because you mark up your text with these tags (the things in the pointy brackets) to change something about the way it displays in a web browser. It can get quite elaborate, as you can tell by looking at any good website. But at our level, you put one tag where you want the style to start, and the same tag, with a forward slash in it, where you want the style to end, and you can have a little fun making your comments fancier.
If you've used the buttons to format your diaries or comments, you know that the <strong> tag is for boldface and the <em> tag is for italics (em stands for "emphasized".) To these, we can add the <u> tag to underline. We can use the <big> tag to make some text a little bigger and the <small> tag if we want to be very quiet. We can also create our own subscripts with the <sub> tag, so we can write things like H2O, and our own superscripts157 with the <sup> tag, so we are not screwed if we have more than three footnotes and run out of the ampersand-created special characters in our chart above. The <blockquote> tag
puts something in a blockquote box.
The <center> tag, um, centers something.
Could be words, could be a picture.
And of course, there's that squiggle:
It centers itself, without any help from you. You can put it anywhere, by storing this code and pasting it wherever you want: <p class='divider-doodle'>
I had been thinking we could wrap text around a picture next, like this, but that would mean we'd have to talk about what all that gibberish is that we paste from our photo hosting website when we post a picture (because we have to stuff some more gibberish in there). That seems like a lot for a Friday afternoon, so perhaps we'll do that another time. Or, you can see this excellent diary by Julie Waters, if you're keen to know right now. As always, please use the comments to talk about anything that's making you cranky, ask questions, and answer someone else's questions if you can. We've come a long way here by helping each other, and we're very glad everyone who's still here is still here!
Nurse Kelley Sez: Give our belinda some f*cking mojo, kos!!