Note: When viewing a blog post in Drupal, make sure you click on the title to see the complete post.

For those who don't know, HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark-up Language. Its a series of opening and closing tags used to format information online. You will need to learn a handful of tags to post your progress to your blog.

Here's the basic list:

• <p> x </p> - the paragraph tag, this is the tag you'll use for most content
• <h#> x </h#> - the header tag, numbered according to importance. An h1 tag, for instance, is like a thesis statement--only one per page!
• <ul> x </ul> - the unordered list tag, this "opens" a list, you open a list before tagging list items. When you have finished your list, your close this tag. List
• <li> x </li> - the list item tag
• So, a completed list looks like this:
  <ul>
  <li> Tom Brady </li>
  <li> Joe Montana </li>
  <li> Dan Marino </li>
  </ul>

• <blockquote> x </blockquote> - the blockquote tag does exactly what its name implies: it sets off a block of text as a quote (adjusting margins, color, font, etc.)

These are all the structural tags we'll need today. Virtually every piece of information in your syllabus will fit into the above categories. We can add some semantic tags to our list:

• <strong> x </strong> - the strong tag appears as bold face. Use this for information that needs to be loud.
• <em> x </em> - the emphasis tag appears as italics. Use this for information that needs to be differentiated.
• <cite> x </cite> - the cite tag appears as italics (by default it appears exactly as the emphasis tag). Anything that would receive italics according to MLA citation should get the cite tag (any major publication--a book, a movie, a tv series, an album, etc.). The em tag is reserved for stress and emphasis, not for citation.

The final tag you'll need to know is the anchor tag, commonly referred to as the "a" tag, used to create links. This one is a bit more complicated, but I wouldn't say difficult. I'll show you what a finished link looks like:

• lt;a href="http://www.marccsantos.com">> Feel free to visit my homepage! </a>
  What going on here? The anchor tag defines the destination, and the text in between the anchor tags is the text constituting the link. We';; practice this one in class.

I want you to compose a "welcome" blog post formatted like mine to practice using these tags. Make sure your post has at least one link.