Internet & Society Course Blog

HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language and is used to create documents on the Web. PHP stands for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (it’s a recursive acronym), which is used to create dynamic Web pages. (That is, the Web page is generated when you call it up based on additional information available.)

If you want to play around with changing some things in your theme templates, you will need to know some amount of basic HTML and feel comfortable enough with computer code to look around in the PHP files to see what you may be able to change. HTML files usually have a .html ending (although in some cases they are truncated to .htm), while PHP files end in .php. Although none of the files you’ll encounter here end in .htm(l), knowing basic HTML will help you tweak other types of files. It will also help in writing your posts.

In addition to PHP files, there is also a file ending in .css in your theme folder. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet. Information in such a file is used to style Web pages. One important difference among the different themes we are using across our blogs is that they rely on different CSS files to render them. If you want to change the color or size of fonts on your blog, you should look for related information in the .css file.

For example, colors are usually denoted by six or three numbers/letters (often a mix of the two) so if you want to change the color of something on your blog, look for such six- or three-digit codes preceded by a # sign.

There are numerous HTML guides online. Here is one that explains some of the basics clearly. Here are some pointers on how you can achieve certain outcomes in CSS (understanding this will require some basic HTML knowledge though). This tutorial lets you play with CSS code right on the page. Finally, here is a tutorial that brings together basics about HTML and CSS in one document.