Connect Simply

This is one question I’m asked a lot. If you compose a nicely formated post in word or some other program, copy and paste into your blog, you may get some strange consequences. Sometimes the spacing isn’t right. Other times, the font doesn’t match rest of your blog. Not as pretty as you expected. Yuck, What happened? My blog is possessed!

Many times I’ve typed a post, hit the wrong button, my cat walked over my keyboard. (Don’t you dare hack up another hairball on my keyboard again!!!) Or maybe on of the kids handed me something while I was typing. So sad to see those words disappear. Not as much fun to re-type as it was to create in the first place. No undo button in the blog.

Makes sense to compose your posts in your word processor. It is a little more forgiving.

Most blogs styles are set up with css. CSS is very cool. It tells your website what colors, fonts, etc. to use. Imagine changing just the color of your website which has grown to 100+ pages. Do you really want to go to each page and change the html code on each? Not me. Enter CSS. Change the style sheet and all your pages change at once. Pretty cool!

Now here is the thing. Those word programs format contains all kinds of code telling what font to use, size, color etc. When your copy from that program, all the formatting comes with it. You paste it into your blog and the formatting code gets added in, and often the results aren’t what you were wanting.

If you really want to see how ugly it looks, I will give you an example from Blogger:

< em >< span style="color: rgb(153, 51, 0);" >There are few things more basic (or tastier) than freshly cooked, light and fluffy rice.< /span>< /em>< /strong>

When all you needed was the words:

There are few things more basic (or tastier) than freshly cooked, light and fluffy rice.

Go to your edit post page, and click on the edit html code button and you’ll see what I mean. All kinds of extra stuff thrown in.

Solution

When you copy from your word processing program, see if there is a way to copy without formatting. I know Firefox has such an option, maybe some word processor does too.

Or simply copy your words into notebook, it dumps the formating, then copy and past into your blog. And you’ll have the added benefit of uniform posts. Of course if you want to get wacky and change something you can always insert a little html code into your posts.