How to Use Links in a Blog Post

Please pay close attention to the requirements for the Blog Assignment, which are posted to the Course Documents section of Blackboard. Please note that the assignment calls for including in your blog entry at least five links to relevant articles or other web sites. These links should be embedded into the document as hyperlinks (i.e., text that you can click on to bring up another web site), rather than pasted to the end of your entry or included in parentheses at the end of a sentence. This is important, because using the hyperlinks lets me see exactly how your sources relate to the points you are making in the blog entry.

The links are easy to do. As you are typing your post, just highlight the text that you want to be linked, then click on the hyperlink tool in the menu right above where you are typing. The hyperlink tool looks vaguely like the earth with an infinity sign over it and is just to the right of the text color tool (a black T next to a multi-colored box). Once you've clicked on that link a box will come up for your link. Just paste the web address into the box and click OK.

The links should be used to show where you got the information to support specific claims in your blog entry. For an example, in my sample blog entry on the Knoxville Solar Cities grant I wrote that the city planned to use its grant funds to pay for installing solar panels on the cities new downtown transit center. The link that I used is for a local newspaper article that explains how the city planned to use the grant funds. You can also use the links to direct your reader to sources of greater information about your topic, such as when I mentioned solar photovoltaics and linked to a page that provided detailed information on that technology.

Oh, and one more thing... don't use Wikipedia as one of your links!