How to create symbols on your blog, Web site, or Squidoo lens with HTML numeric codes

These are just strings of characters and numbers that stand for a particular character. All you do is replace the character with the string. This has to be in the HTML code of your web site. The "edit" mode on Squidoo modules handles this for you, but if you're building a web site, be sure you're working on the code. You'll be able to tell because HTML code has lots of < angle brackets > and < weird > funny tags < /weird >.

These are the codes that have come up for me—if you want to add your own favorites, drop a post in the guestbook and I'll try to look them up for you.

Bullet (•) &#8226;
Cent sign (¢) &#162;
Copyright sign (©) &#169;
Degree sign (°) &#176;
Em dash (—) &#8212;
Euro symbol (€) &#8364;
Heart symbol (♥) &#9829;
Inverted exclamation (¡) &#161;
Inverted question (¿) &#191;
Non-breaking space &#160;
Pi (π) &#960;
Pound sterling (£) &#163;
Registered trademark sign (®) &#174;
Section sign (§) &#167;
Trademark sign (™) &#153;
Umlout o (ö) &#246;
Yen symbol (¥) &#165;

♥ (type &#9829;) is just one of the many very useful shortcuts you can use on Twitter. When you've got 140 characters, every one counts!

(Follow me on twitter at twitter.com/soniasimone)

It took me some digging, but I finally found a numeric code for the heart symbol. &#9829; will display ♥♥♥s to your ♥'s content.

The heart symbol isn't universally supported by browsers, so let me know in the guestbook if you see hinky characters!

Another cool option is to find a free or cheap heart .jpg and link to it as an image. The lens above on HTML and Squidoo lenses will help you if you don't know how to do that. An image link will probably be more robust and work better across different browsers than the code will.

(Don't link to an image that isn't free and/or that you don't own, that's lame and bad manners.)

Try istockphoto for an amazing collection of cheap and good photos and illustrations that will work beautifully just for this purpose. (That's where I found the oh-so-cool blue numbers photo that I'm using in this lens.)

With just a tiny bit of head-scratching you can learn the basics of HTML and CSS, and then you can use one of the great free templates available at Open Source Web Design (www.oswd.org). You don't have to pay anything at all for them--just link back to the designer.

Buy an inexpensive image at www.istockphoto.com, crop it to fit, grab some cheap hosting at godaddy and you're up and running. Maybe $50 if you have to buy a couple of how-to books. I set up my copywriting business site using the "Andreas01" template from OSWD. It was easy to set up and customize, and I think it's a great, sharp simple design.

There are many references around the Web for HTML numeric codes. The ones below are fairly user-friendly.

www.foxinternet.co.uk/keyboard.html

www.december.com/html/spec.codes.html

Remember that you need to use the HTML mode to enter these codes.

Some misguided sites will convert your nice, clean numeric codes to versions that aren't as widely supported. (Don't ask me why, I think it's nuts.) For example, when I was on Typepad, they did this on my blog, which broke my RSS feed every once in awhile. Nonbreaking spaces are especially bad culprits.

Look around for a "plain text" mode. That sometimes means "OK we trust you, we'll actually use the code you enter."

Some systems will just get in your way and keep you from doing things right. Send 'em a message on their bug report software, and tell them you want the right to code with HTML numeric codes, as nature intended!

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