If you’re blogging, there’s a little bit of HTML code you should know. Yes, there are plenty of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools out there that require no coding, from the visual editor in WordPress to offline blogging tool like Windows Live Writer (which I’ll write about in another post). But if something goes wrong — you just can’t get two pieces of text to line up right, say — it pays to be able to take a look at the code and see what’s going on.

HTML is short for HyperText Markup Language, and is derived from the codes typesetters used to use to know where to insert different typefaces, horizontal rules, larger text for headings, italics and boldface, and so on. The basic idea is simple — you put tags around the text you want to modify, like this: <tag>this is the text you want to modify</tag>.

Here are some of the most common tags to get you started:

<strong>Bold</strong>	Bold
<em>Italic</em>	Italic
<h1>Page Header</h1>	Page Header
<h2>Headline</h2>	Headline
<h3>Section Header</h3>	Section Header
<a href=”http://site.com”>Link to site.com </a>	Link to site.com
<img src=”http://www.site.com/path/to/images/image.jpg”>	(Note:the <img> tag is unique in not needing a closing tag.)
<p>	Starts a new paragraph
<br>	Inserts a line break
<ol> <li>List item </li> <li>List item </li> </ol>	Ordered (Numbered) List List Item List Item
<ul> <li>List item </li> <li>List item </li> </ul>	Unordered (Bulleted) List List Item List Item

There are a lot more tags, but these are enough for about 90% of all the web writing you’ll ever do.