We are going to ease into the “StumbleUpon Tips” arena very slowly. There are a lot of things that you can do to make your entries in StumbleUpon more attractive and more noticeable. Today’s tip is going to be the easiest of all. However, it will let you dress up your reviews of pages just a little bit, perhaps enough to get you noticed a little more than you are already. And that may bring more people to your blog page.

It is going to involve writing a little HTML. Very little, as a matter of fact, not enough to be the least bit difficult. We are going to learn how to turn italics mode on and off, and how to turn bold mode on and off. These are simple things, but they will make your comments look much more stylish. Don’t use them all the time or people will just think that you are showing off, which will send fewer people to your blog page. When you are typing your page review into the text box SU provides for that purpose, you can do the following:

To turn italics on, type <em> (em stands for “emphasis”) and to turn them off, type </em>. So, in order to dress up “This is a plain comment.” write “This is <em>a plain</em> comment.” in the text box and what readers will see is “This is a plain comment.”

To turn on bold mode, type <b> (“b” for “bold”) and to turn it off, type </b>. So, in order to make “This is a plain comment.” more attractive write “This is <b>a plain</b> comment.” and what readers will see is “This is a plain comment.”

You can even combine the two, typing “This is a <em><b>fancy</b></em> comment” which will turn into “This is a fancy comment” when you save your review.

I should point that part out, too. As long as you type the markup commands in pairs, like <em>something</em> everything between the “<” and “>” angle brackets will disappear from the final displayed comment when you save your page review, as will the angle brackets themselves. If you forget to type in the closing </em> or </b> markup commands, some odd-looking text might be the result. So make sure to use the command in on-off pairs.

You’re now on your way to fancier page reviews. We’ll cover another way to make your StumbleUpon experience fancier in our next Tips column.