The programming code that allows a browser to display a web page is called html which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. The actual commands are referred to as "tags." Each tag is enclosed in angle brackets (what we commonly refer to as less than and greater than symbols ""). Some, but not all, tags require a closing tag, preceeded by a forward slash "/". You can't really type an html command to see in a forum like this because your browser will see it as code and do what it instructs rather than display the code so I'm going to substitute square brackets ("[ ]") for the angle brackets.

Copy and paste the following into Notepad. Once you've pasted it hold the Ctrl key down and press H. This will bring up the Find and Replace window. In the top box type the opening square bracket "[" (minus the quotation marks) and in the second box type the opening angle bracket ""). Save the file somewhere you can easily remember to find it. Now whenever you wish to embed a picture or create a link within the body of your message you need only highlight then copy (Ctrl+C) then paste (Ctrl+V) the appropriate line into your post and change the text that refers to the link or picture you want.

Start copy

Link

[a href="URL TO LINK HERE"]Text describing link goes here [/a]

Picture

[img src="URL TO IMAGE HERE"]

End copy

I'm going to show you how this works using the following link to the Gardenweb Oklahoma Gardening Forum and an old picture I have of my apartment patio.

[a href="http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/okgard";]Oklahoma Gardening forum[/a]

[img src="http://members.cox.net/cymry/22_19.jpg";]

This is how it appears with the square brackets changed to angle brackets:

Oklahoma Gardening forum

{{gwi:1101925}}

There are other things you can add, if you wish to, that can change how things work. For instance, the following code causes a link to open in a new browser window rather than hijacking your current window. The addition of target="_blank" after the link text does this:

[a href="http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/okgard"; target="_blank"]Oklahoma Gardening forum[/a]

Oklahoma Gardening forum

This next example resizes the image to make it smaller, makes it a link to the original image (although it could be made a link to anywhere), opens the link in a new window, centers the image in the message, and adds text that shows up when you mouse over the image:

[center][a href="http://members.cox.net/cymry/22_19.jpg"; target="_blank"][img src="http://members.cox.net/cymry/22_19.jpg"; alt="Debra's apartment patio" width="150" height="100"][/a][/center]
{{gwi:1101925}}

There are other interesting things you can do with text and picture links, but the basic code I gave for you to copy will get the job done just fine.

Debra