fix

[amelia_petkova]

Oops, there's a mistake in the earlier entry. I had meant to say "He liked women a lot."

Comments

[hasufin.livejournal.com]

Good to meet you, too.


Livejournal uses HTML (with a few exceptions, such as LJ-cuts, found in the help section).


Ooohhh... to under this, you'll need to understand markup language and hypertext. Because, well, HTML is HyperTest Markup Language. Recalling that you're an English major, you really ought to look up those terms. They relate very strongly to Information Theory.

Short version is that you can put normal text into your LJ comments without any trouble.
However, you may also choose to put tags in your text. A tag is a special set of characters that tells the browser - Internet Explorer or Firefox, in most cases - "do this here". Tags are always in the "<>" characters. I can't show you that easily because the browser will do what I tell it to, rather than show you how it's being told. So, for the rest of this post, replace the "[" character with "<" and "]" with ">".
Each tag is of a certain format:

[tag other info]affected words[/tag]

Not all tags have other info... like the italic and bolding you've mentioned. There's nothing else in those tags. It's just "make the following words italic" words in italic "stop doing italics."
You tell the browser this by using the "i" tag:
[i]stuff that will be in italics[/i].
stuff that will be in italics
Note the "/" character. That's the closing mark. It tells the browser "stop making italics."
Other important HTML tags to know are bold:
[b]stuff in bold[/b]
stuff in bold
And URLs:
[a href=http://www.google.com]Here's this great search engine you can use[/a]
Here's this great search engine you can use (http://www.google.com)

Now, be careful that you have a closing tag to match any tag you put in. Your comptue ris dumb - if you tell it "putting all the following in italics" and you never say "stop doing italics"... it won't stop. Very annoying, especially with friends pages on LJ.