This was guest posted by Rob O at 2 Dolphins. 

Character.  It is the standards, principles, and distinctive qualities that distinguishes one’s effort from those of others.   Certainly few goals are more worthwhile as to blog in a manner that demonstrates those attributes.   Indeed, character is very likely the thing that keeps readers coming back to your blog.

But as worthy and productive a topic as that is, I’m actually here to talk about a different kind of character.   ASCII characters.  Y’know, the symbols, letters or punctuation marks that make up the set of computer characters that most of us are at least somewhat familiar with.

Whether you’re crafting a blog post about Älmhult (the Swedish birthplace of global furnishings icon, Ikea), waxing nostalgic about when soda pops were only 25¢, or trying to inject a little international flavor (¡Hola!) into an article, there’ll probably come a time when you need to use special characters in your blog.   Even with a fairly basic blog, there may be instances where you need to nest a double quote within a TITLE or ALT tag, for example, and this can cause all sorts of unintended effects.

Fortunately, once you know the trick, using ASCII characters in your blog posts is easy to do!

ASCII character charts are abundant on the Internet, but none so straight-forward and readily usable as Vincent Heemskerk’s HTML Codes - Characters and Symbols.  Referring to Vincent’s chart, you can see that the ASCII decimal number for the copyright symbol is 169, which translates to  &# 169 ;  for the HTML code for that same symbol.   So, to insert a copyright sign in a blog post, you’d use:

&# 169 ;  2007 MyCompanyName

…to get:

© 2007 MyCompanyName

And as the chart linked above shows, there are ‘friendly’ HTML names for some special characters.   So you could also use:

& copy ;  2007 MyCompanyName

…to get the same results.

The same technique can be used to place other special characters, such as the greater than (>), ampersand (&), or even common fractions (½) into your HTML code.

So, now that you know how to insert special letters & symbols into posts, the possibilities are endless.   Go give your blog some character!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007| Category: Blog and Design Tips, Blogging Tips, Coding Tutorials, Writing | Comment | Trackback