Skill #2: How to cite another post or insert an article

1) Say you need to direct your reader to an original source (perhaps a news article, another blog post or online article) that is serving as your prompt. Click on the title of the blog post or article to get its url. It will look like this: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wlas0006/1001/2011/09/talking-about-minds.html. Copy this

Note that if you post just the blog url--for example, http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wlas0006/1001/--your reader will see the most recent posts, not necessarily the one on which you want to focus your reader's attention.

2) Next click on the Link button in the create entry screen, the one that looks like a little chain link. You are going to paste the url, the link address, here.

3) After pasting the url, the Create Entry screen will embed the url in the html code. It will look like this: ^a href="http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wlas0006/1001/2011/09/talking-about-minds.html"> There should be a little < before the initial a, but if I put that in, the code won't be visible to you. So I used a ^ as a proxy for <.

4) This seems formidable but don't panic! You have one last thing to do. You need to insert linking text to make the url link visible to your reader. Note the >< in the html code. The text goes there, like this: <[insert text]> .

For example, you want to comment , "I found this cartoon very droll. Sometimes I do feel that blog posts are like incessant, pointless barking." You need to cite the cartoon, and the obvious place to do that is to make the link text "this cartoon."

What you do is this:

You write, "I found" then you insert the link. Then you insert the text, THIS CARTOON, between the >< as directed above. Your entry will now read "I found ^a href="http://blog.lib.umn.edu/wlas0006/1001/2011/09/talking-about-minds.html">THIS CARTOON /a> very droll. etc". (again, ^ = <.) What your reader will see is: "I found THIS CARTOON very droll. etc"

Not too hard!