Tying Your Blog to Your Web Site

So at this point you hopefully have a collection of web pages and a blog hosted separately on Blogger.com or some other similar blog service. The question now is how to tie the two online components together. As you may already be guessing, this is simply a matter of adding a link to your web pages that connect them to the blog.

Following is an example of how to wire the hockey blog on Blogger.com to the hockey player page for Terry Lancaster via an <a> tag:

 <a href="http://mcmafia.blogspot.com/" rel="external">View blog</a> 

Notice that the URL specified in the HRef attribute is the same URL you established when first creating the blog on Blogger. Also, if you recall, the rel attribute of the <a> tag is used to sidestep a limitation of current browsers so that you can open a link in a separate browser window without invalidating a page as an XHTML page. This trick was covered back in Hour 3, "Linking to Other Web Pages," when you were shown how to open a link in a new browser window.

Figure 21.10 shows the new and improved hockey player page with the blog link highlighted near the bottom of the page.

If you click the View Blog link, the Music City Mafia blog opens in a new browser window, and looks just like what you saw in Figure 21.9.