How to Cite a Blog & Automatically Generate Citations for your Blog

The MLA format for citing a blog is:

Last Name, First. "Title of Entry." Weblog Entry. Title of Weblog. Date Posted. Date Accessed (URL).

You can find more information on studenthacks and on the Purdue website.

Now comes the fun part. If you’re familiar with the Wolfram mathworld website, there is a “CITE THIS AS” section at the bottom of every page (example). I wanted to reproduce something similar for my blog. As you may have already noticed, there is a “Cite as” box at the bottom of every post. Of course, I didn’t go over every post to add a cite-as box. I used the google blogger API to automatically add this to every post. Here’s how you can reproduce it for your own blog

1. Go to the “Edit HTML” section for your template
2. Enable the “Expand Widget Templates” check box
3. Scroll down (or search: Ctrl + f) for
   <data:post.body/>
   This may require some tweaking as your template may be different. The idea is to locate the “post body” section – right after the body text of your post.
   
4. Copy the following HTML code:
   

   <!-- BEGIN CITE AS CODE - BY T. SAAD -http://pleasemakeanote.blogspot.com --> 
   <br/> 
   <p style='border-width:1px;border-style:solid;border-color:orange; padding:4px'> 
   <font color='orange'> 
   Cite as: 
   <br/> 
   LAST NAME, FIRST NAME &quot;<data:post.title/>. 
   &quot; Weblog entry from <a href='http://LINK-TO-YOUR-BLOG> <data:blog.title/></a>. 
   <a expr:href='data:post.url'><data:post.url/></a> 
   </font> 
   </p>
   <br/> 
   <!-- END CITE AS CODE –> 



5. Save your template

Voila! Don’t forget to put your name and the link to your blog. You can easily modify the above script with little HTML and CSS knowledge.