I’ve recently gotten several questions along this line, so I thought it would be helpful to have a reference page to show people how to format their comments. All content on a web page is rendered with HTML, so we can use HTML tags to handle basic text formatting. ** Notice that these tags work like parentheses — your content goes inside them. Also notice that the closing tag is identical to the opening tag, EXCEPT there is a “/” at the beginning of the word or letter.
Bold
If you’d like to make part of your text bold, simply do this:
<strong>This text is bold</strong>
And you get this: This text is bold
Italicize
If you’d like to italicize something, simply do this:
<em>This text is italicized</em>
And you get this: This text is italicized (** the “em” stands for “emphasis”)
Underline
To underline, try this (may not work on all sites):
<u>This text is underlined</u>
And you get this: This text is underlined
Strike Through
Sometimes, when you’re writing a sentence, it’s fun to give the impression that you started to write one word, but then chose another. You can accomplish that in this way:
Ah, what an <del>insipid</del> insightful comment!
And you get this: Ah, what an insipid insightful comment!
Quote
If you want to insert a famous quote, or just quote something that was said in a previous comment, do this:
<blockquote>Four score and seven years ago...</blockquote>
And you get this:
Four score and seven years ago…
Links
If you’d like to insert a link to another page, you can do that too by using an “anchor” tag. But be careful — too many links and WordPress will think your comment is spam.
<a href="http://google.com">Google</a>
And you get this: Google
Just remember to always put in your closing tag, or things will start to look really funky! Hope this helps — happy commenting!
Images and Videos
WordPress has actually made it pretty easy to post images and videos. Initially, I thought this functionality was disabled, because it doesn’t allow the HTML tags for them, but all you have to do is post the link to the image or video that you’d like to reference, and it will show up. That’s literally all you have to do. Find a video or image, and paste its URL into a comment.
Edit: When I’m writing HTML, I often find it useful to go ahead and type in the closing tag right after I’ve typed in the opening tag. Then I go back and put whatever content I need in between them. I’ve found that cuts down tremendously on the number of mistakes I would otherwise make.
Finding Truth 
You’re a star, sir. Always wondered about this and just it was something about the theme one had.
Shops I am more an it than IT.
Shall cut and past this until I have got the hang of it.
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Champion! I never could work out how people did the fancy things, even on my own blog comments section! 😦
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You can also use “i” for italics. This text is italicized.
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John – I tried some of this on Mak’s WP site several weeks ago, and it didn’t work, I think the administrator has to enable HTML before it will work. I don’t recall, is your’s WP? My own GoDaddy site uses a different code for underline, but it’s the same as Nate’s for everything else.
Going to try an experiment, lets see what happens —
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Nothing – oh well —
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Thanks for the underline add, Nate.
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practice session
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What’s the difference between
I think I see the slight dif…
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@Nan, that’s true, though <i> is starting to stand for “icon” in the newer standards.
Glad this post was so helpful to many of you! 🙂
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Oh, and archaeopteryx, I’m impressed that you were using CSS to achieve the same affect. That’s bit more advanced. Since WordPress sites like mine are free, they typically disable CSS insertion so people can’t take advantage of the free options. They charge extra to allow people the kind of flexibility that CSS brings.
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Good stuff as usual Nate. Thanks!
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Nate (and anyone else interested) – two sites to check into and, imo, bookmark:
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_img.asp
http://goo.gl/
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Nate, RE: “WordPress sites like mine are free” – if you’ve had a chance to check out my own site yet, you will have seen how many features I have at my disposal – it isn’t free, but I pay only $3.99 per month, at Website Palace, so that may not be free, but it’s very close.
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thanks for the help,
Is there also a way to put the comments in like a box.
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Try blockquote. I think that’s what you’re looking for… It looks different, depending on the theme each site uses. So while mine looks like this:
Yours will look different, because you use a different theme.
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For Arch,
To post an image, you need to use the following tag:
<img src="http://urlForYourImage.jpg" />Of course, you can wrap an image in an anchor tag too, if you want to give people a link to see a larger version, etc.
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But what if I want to upload an image from my computer?
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Good question. You’ll first need to host it somewhere, like Flickr, or even your own website. Once it’s hosted, the url for the image (which will always end with the image’s file extension), is all you need to include as the src (source) attribute of the img tag.
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Nate, as you’ve doubtless already seen on your site, tried it, didn’t work.
Here’s where it’s anchored:
So putting this with it:
We get:
With this result:
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In the famous words of Vinnie Barbarino, “I’m SO confused!”
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Testing whether your blog allows lists:
Test
Test
Test
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Nope. Guess not.
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Dave, it you’re trying to do
• bullets,
1. numbers
A. or letters,
take it to a text program, create what you want, and paste it into the comment box.
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