Beginning blogging tips: part 2

I've had a couple friends ask how to do some things, so here are a few more tips. Kudos to you if you already know all of this.

1. If you start a post, save it, and go back to edit it another day, it will post it waaaayy back in its proper chronological order rather than posting it as your most recent. You can manually change the date and time by clicking on the "post options" link on the bottom left corner of the composition screen. That brings up another little tool bar. On the right hand side you can enter the corrected day and time.
2. If your header picture is bigger than you'd like, you can shrink or crop it in a couple different programs. Photoshop and HP Image zone (if you have an HP scanner) are the two I use. The pixel size of my current banner is 925 x 250. In photoshop you can go to Image and then Image size. Make sure that constrain proportions is checked or your picture will end up disproportional.
3. Ok, last time I avoided giving real html help because blogger is very particular about using code in posts. I will attempt it here. While writing a post you can use the little cheat buttons up top for links, bold, and italics. If you want to do those in a comment, you have no such help. You need to use html tags. <> brackets denote a tag. To close a tag, you must use the / and whatever the beginning of the tag was. (As I am writing this, I'm noticing that blogger is making it difficult and erasing part of my tag, even if I use spaces.) Sorry if this doesn't make sense. I know there are escape characters to preserve code so you can see it, but I haven't gotten that far in my own knowledge of html. So, if this description is just a bunch of rambling that makes no sense, tell me in the comments or in an email and I'll email you an attachment that should hopefully be more clear. Hopefully.
   
1. To make a word bold, put the letter "b"(without the "") inside the first set of <> and in the closing tag, delete the spaces I have between all the characters: < >word < / b >
   
2. To make a word italicized, put and "i" in the first set of <> and delete the spaces in the closing tag: <>word< / i >
3. To create a link is a little harder, but I will try and help you here. The only space that should exist in this little string of code is between a and href. Blogger erased it, so just know that the letter "a" (without "") and a space should precede href.
   
1. < href = "http://web address"> link word < / a>
4. The first picture you upload will end up being the picture on the bottom. If you don't want to do a lot of rearranging, upload them in reverse order. To move pictures in html mode, look for the beginning and end of the tag. The beginning starts with "a onblur" inside <> and ends with /a inside <>. Cut and paste the code wherever you want it in the post. This will preserve the code and you'll be able to enlarge the picture by clicking on it in the finalized post.

That's all I can give right now. That was exhausting trying to figure out how to circumvent blogger's weird html restrictions.