Helpful Hint - linking in your blog posts

While your posts to the blog should be your thoughts in your words, your blog posts should properly cite back to the original work to credit the author.  Additionally, when you draw ideas or inspiration from others, you should link back to that source as well.

Linking is pretty easy in blogger.  Here are the steps.

1.  First, in another browser or browser tab, open the webpage you wish to link to.  For this example, I will link back to the wikipedia definition of plagiarism.  Open wikipedia in a browser tab and search for plagiarism.

2.  Now, you need to find a piece of text you want to anchor the link to.  Highlight that text with your mouse cursor.  For example, you might highlight the word plagiarism.  

3.  With the word (or phrase) you wish to anchor to highlighted, click on the 'Link' button on the editing bar.  This brings up a popup which has the "text to display" already filled in with your highlighted text [note, if you did not highlight anything, you can just type in the words you want the link to say right here].  The next dialog area is for the web address.  Go back to your other browser (wikipedia in this example) and highlight the web address.  Copy it (control-c) and go back to the "Link" dialog.  Paste (control-v) the address into the web address dialog.

4.  Click okay.  You should now have the word plagiarism linked back to Wikipedia.

There are other options on the 'Link' dialog, you are welcome to explore them yourself (you can, for instance, embed an email).

You will also note that beside Link, you can insert images and insert video (Youtube is an example). 

There is a lot you can do in a blog post - properly connecting your work to its source/inspirational material goes a long way towards effectively using social media.