MySpaceENHANCE.com

The Basics of Text and Myspace

What you will learn in this section

Making text bold, underlined, strikethrough and italic
The break and paragraph commands
Changing your font color, face and size
Aligning your text
Creating text links
Creating Marquees

One of the most basic and essential concepts when it comes down to Myspace is being able to edit your text. It is highly likely that if you’ve been on Myspace you’ve seen lots of people who can either leave amazingly good looking comments, or you’ve seen their Myspace’s with some strange fonts on there. The purpose of this tutorial is to take you through the very basic concepts of editing your texts, for either your profile or comments.

To edit text, we use a language called HTML. Now, don’t worry, its not rocket science, and you don’t have to learn a lot. Just a few basic commands will get you up and running in no time to creating wonderfully enriched content.

Before I explain how to do this, it might be best to describe how HTML works. To use an HTML command, we use tags. Tags look like this <this is a tag> and they’ll end like so </this is a tag>. Inside the <> go the command we wish to use, and in between the <> and </> goes whatever we want it to effect. What you might also be wondering is where do you we put these commands? Well, the answer is either when you edit your profile, or when you’re posting someone a new comment. And don’t worry, the tag doesn’t appear in the comment or your profile, so while your html may look ugly, as soon as it’s displayed on screen, it’ll look very nice.

Making text bold, underlined, strikethrough and italic is probably the easiest thing you can do with html. All of these can be accomplished with one letter, so look below on how to use them.

<u>Will make your text underlined</u>

<s>~~Will make your text have a strikethrough it~~</s>

<i>Will make your text italic</i>

These are all very easy commands, making them excellent ones to help you learn to get started.

The break and paragraph commands are very useful for formatting your text. Using <br> and <p> will add new lines, or in simpler terms, will be like you’ve pressed enter. The difference between <br> and <p> is that <br> places the text below by one line, while <p> does it with two lines.

e.g.

Typing text here with <br>

will cause it to go onto this line.

Typing text here with <p>

will cause it to go onto this line.

Changing your font color, face and size is one of the more important, yet trickier text edits, using the <font> tag. The reason this is tricky is because you have to add extra tags to it to change the size, face and color of your font. For example, if you wish to change the size of it, you must write <font size=”3”>Then your text here followed by </font> to close it. Note that you do not close it with </font size=”3”>, just simply </font>. Below will show you how to use each of the other attributes for the font tag.

<font color=”red”>Will change the color</font>

<font face=”comic sans”>Will change the font</font>

<font size=”5”>Will change the size</font>

<font color=”red” face=”comic sans” size=”5”>It is also possible to combine all of them in the same font tag</font>

Aligning your text is the term we use for making it appear on either the left, right or centre of the page. Like in word, it is possible to align. To do so, simply type

<div align=”left”>Aligns to the left</div>

<div align=”center”>Centers your text</div>

<div align=”right”>Aligns to the right</div>

Creating text links is probably one of the more important piece of HTML code you should learn for Myspace. You may want to create a link for many different reasons, either to link to some site you found, or a photo gallery you have. The following code is all you need to create a link and the example should show you have to use it.

<a href=”http://insertyourlinkaddresshere”>Then place whatever text you want to have the link with </a>

Its very simple to do and won’t take you too long to master.

Creating marquees is a great way to display some cool text running across your Myspace page. You can have these displayed in comments as well. To utilize this rather nifty feature, we use the <marquee> tag. A basic marquee running from left to right looks like this

<marquee>This is a marquee</marquee>

Yet this looks a little boring, so it is possible to add a few more effects to it. The table below will show you’re the different tags you can use to achieve different marquee effects.

The Direction tag	<marquee direction=”left”>Going Left</marquee> <marquee direction=”right”>Going Right</marquee> <marquee direction=”up”>Going Up</marquee> <marquee direction=”down”>Going Down</marquee>
The Behavior Tag	<marquee behavior=”alternate”>Left and right </marquee>
The Style Tag	<marquee style=”border:black 1px solid”>Creates a solid 1px border</marquee> <marquee style=”background:red”>Creates a red background</marquee>
Other commands	<marquee behavior="alternate" direction="up" width="80%"><marquee direction="right">Zig Zagging</marquee></marquee>

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