Formatting Your Posts Easily and Effectively

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the "page" formatting language of the World Wide Web. Similar to word-processor tags, HTML is easy to learn (but much tougher to master), and often times it's quite cryptic. For example, surrounding a word with <b>bold</b> tags will make it stand out and be noticed. But what on earth do <a href="">these tags</a> do??? Strangely, they make words "clickable," pointing them towards the URL you specify, for example:

<A HREF="http://www.kennyrankin.com/rankinbbs/">The Kenny Rankin Forum</A>

turns into:

The Kenny Rankin Forum

Regardless of the expertise required to use HTML within your message posts, you probably don't want to waste your time by having to type out the HTML formatting "tags" each time you want to make your post a little more interesting or more effective. For this reason, we have set up the BBS to except HTML "Easy Tags" that will make it much easier for you to post a nicely formatted message.

Most HTML tags are not allowed in your message posts (there are over a hundred different HTML tags), but the most useful ones are allowed. Below is a table of all of the "Easy Tags" used within the Message Board. Simply surround your text with the tags to get the desired effect.

  • b[bold text]b
  • i[italicized text]i
  • s[sample text]s
  • -[strikethrough text]-
  • p[preformatted text]p

    The Message Board also comes with Easy Tags for making text certain colors. These tags should be used with caution, as they can pretty easily render a post unreadable if you don't use them sparingly. (NOTE: The color tags use {squiggly brackets} as opposed to the [square brackets] that are used above.)

  • r{red text}r
  • b{blue text}b
  • g{green text}g
  • s{sky-blue text}s

    The final, and possibly greatest HTML Easy Tag is the "URL-izer." This feature will turn any URL you type into a link to that URL, automatically. You are still quite welcome to use the <A HREF=""></A> tags to create linked text, but if you simply want to give a URL, the URL-izer will save you a lot of time. For instance, within a message post, if you type:
    http://www.yahoo.com/search.html it would automatically turn into:
    http://www.yahoo.com/search.html.

    However, if you were more familiar with HTML, and you typed:
    <A HREF="http://www.yahoo.com/search.html">Search Yahoo</A> it would turn into: Search Yahoo, and it would not be affected by the URL-izer.

    In addition, Email addresses are automatically converted into clickable hyperlinks within your message posts. If you type webmaster@kennyrankin.com, it would be turned into webmaster@kennyrankin.com.