Copy and Paste
In today’s computer literate society, you get so used to some concepts like copy and paste that you start assuming everyone is familiar with the skills required. It becomes difficult to remember when it didn’t exist.
I think a post a few weeks ago by John Chow was a prime example of this. He was explaining about using a typewriter to write a letter and was asked “How do you copy and paste with that?”
So, for anyone how needs to know, here is a quick guide to copying text from a webpage and pasting it into a blog post. The details may vary slightly depending on the blogging software that you use, but the concept is the same. I will use my last post Book Meme as the example.
Find the text on the webpage that you want to use, in this case it was from sarabeth’s post Book Meme 2. Move your mouse to just before the text that you want to copy.
Press and hold the left mouse button, then drag the mouse pointer, which will have probably changed to look like a letter ‘I’, over the text that you want until it is all selected, then let go of the left mouse button.
At this point you either go to the Edit menu on your web-browser and select Copy or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL C (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter C, then let go of both). This copies the selection to the computer’s clipboard.
In your blogging software, choose the place in a post where you want to put the selected text and left click with your mouse in this place. Then either on the Edit menu choose Paste, or you can use the keyboard shortcut CTRL V (press and hold the CTRL key, then press the letter V, then release both).
This pastes the selection from the computer’s clipboard to the location that you selected.
After this you can reformat individual sections by selecting them and choosing Bold or Italic or changing the colour as required.
[Edited for spelling]
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February 23rd, 2007 at 2:59 am
Thanks for helping the old lady out! I do know how to do this, that is copy and paste but somehow I worried about html which is a total mystery to me. I should have realized that Blogger would have taken care of everything. Sarabeth recommended putting it in a word processing program first then editing it, followed by copy and paste again to the blog. This enabled me to get rid of the scorethrough which was in the meme that I didn’t see how to get rid of in Blogger. So it is now in a draft post waiting for me to add a few words and post later.
By the way, is there any way to expand the area of the post in your blog with some button that I haven’t noticed?
Regards
jmb
February 23rd, 2007 at 7:54 am
No problem.
HTML isn’t as bad as it first seems. If you right click in your web browser window you should be able to select View Source or View Page Source, you should get a new window open with the html for the page in it.
Generally speaking each paragraph will start with the < p > code and finish with < /p >. The bulleted list starts with < ul > for unordered list and finishes with < /ul > and each item in a list starts with < li > and finishes with < /li > .
I think in your Blogger software you can select to see the code, so you can see how your page is set out. I’m not sure about expanding the area of the post in your blog, I would have thought that the area would automatically expand and add scrollbars if necessary.
Ian
February 24th, 2007 at 6:16 am
I linked to this post today in my blog but this won’t bring you any readers since I basically only have a couple.
I actually meant your ie Ian’s blog in my query about window size. I have pretty lousy sight due to developing cataracts so I was just asking if somehow one could see your posts in a larger window.
I’ll be getting round to a little html soon, just another language right? I’ve learned French, German, Italian in my day amd I still take Italian classes.
Thanks for your help
Regards
jmb
February 24th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Hi jmb,
Thanks for the link. Sorry, I didn’t read your question properly. There isn’t a button to increase the post area, but you can increase the text size. In your web browser on the View menu, select text Size and adjust it there.
I had been wondering about the layout of the entry pages (the ones with the comments on) and may move the categories section over to the left, that would allow the width of the post area to be increased. I’m also wondering about increasing the default text size of the comments, what do you think?
Regards, Ian
February 25th, 2007 at 3:54 am
Actually Ian, I use Mozilla Firefox so it’s really easy to increase the text size although often I forget and just squint until I realize that I should do something about it. I think it might help to increase the width of the window. Also the text size in the comment section which is miniscule. It just seems to me there is a lot of empty space at the bottom of the display page and so if the window were bigger that would be better. Of course, I don’t know how to fix anything but I have great faith in computer people, who are a special breed. So I assume they can just do whatever I think needs doing without considering that often you have to give up one thing to gain another.
Blabbing on as usual
Regards
jmb