Now you have all read Advice For New Members and Placemarks and Overlays (Basic Training), Right? If you haven't, you better! I will know if you try this "Advanced Material" before you study the basics... and some large ugly Troll will be knocking on your back door late at night if you lie to me.

Look at these two placemarks in my "Temporary Places".

They look about the same... with just 2 small differences, the Icon (which you know how to change) and the Link. And that Link is what this lesson is all about.

Most placemarks just take you someplace in the world and show you what the poster saw and If you click on the Icon in the viewer, a little "Balloon" pops into view with a few extra options.

But some placemarks DaZzLe you with a complete Travelogue.

And what makes those two so different? The difference lies here...

Yes, that little box that pops up when you first create a placemark. And it is actually only the bottom half that makes all the difference in the world.

The Description does it all... with a few well placed secret "Runes"

Let's take a look at some of the actual information that made the above "Ngorongoro Crater" description possible.
(Thanks to Katamari and Me)

The first line is simply the Placemark name, Ngorongoro Crater, that was entered on the top line of the Placemark Editing box.

The second line is a WEB address (URL) creating a link to http://www.hillmanwonders.com/ngorongoro_crater/ngorongoro_crater.htm and is entered just as you see here.

The Google Earth software knows how to handle it. But there is a nicer way of doing it, so it looks like this: Ngorongoro Crater Information.

And now we need to learn our first secret Rune: <a href= , which simply means what follows is a link to an external WEB address.
We also need to end the line with an > and </a> with our text in the middle. The convention says the attribute must be in quotes, so our description text will be:
<a href="http://www.hillmanwonders.com/ngorongoro_crater/ngorongoro_crater.htm">Ngorongoro Crater Information</a>

And this gives us the third line in the balloon. If you just put those two lines in your description, it won't work as advertised... you will need one extra secret Rune in between. The Line Break:   Go ahead, put one of those after the first URL.

Next we have a horizontal line separating the balloon... you guessed it, another Rune. The Horizontal Rule: <hr>

Then we have some text that is BOLD. The secret Rune to make text bold is: , and to make it normal again: . Then a  , followed by some normal text and a couple of  's and repeat until done.

Go to Google Earth and create a placemark, play with these little hints and see if you can make an interesting and informative placemark.

Advanced Users might notice our Secret Runes look a lot like XHTML Tags.

When I return, we will look at adding some COLORS , StYLes, and

images.