What's Wrong with my Blog?

Blogging is a lot of fun, and can be a very rewarding pastime. One of the easiest blogging platforms to use is Blogger, once an independent product but now owned by that giant, Google. You don't need any special knowledge or experience to get started. That's where this blog lives, and it's what I know best. (Sorry WordPress, Tumblr and other bloggers, this post won't be of interest to you. Talk amongst yourselves.)

Blogger is easy and straightforward, but when things start to go wrong you can feel frustrated and discouraged. Have you ever had any of these problems?

• Your post has text is an assortment of different sizes and font styles

•  Someone has "censored" parts of your blog so you can't read the whole post

•  Some text has disappeared like this or doesn't show up

•  Your sidebar of gadgets is now at the bottom of your blog

•  Your latest post isn't showing up in other bloggers' reading lists or in their blog list gadget

Believe it or not, there is a single reason for all these problems. It's one little word.

Word

Microsoft Word, that is. If you compose your blog posts in Word then copy and paste them into your Blogger post editor, you can expect things to go very wrong. Word uses a lot of embedded codes to format documents, and that code just doesn't get along with Blogger's own way of formatting. When the two collide, your blog suffers.

Maybe you didn't copy from Word, but you did copy something - a meme, perhaps - from another blog, and that blogger used Word to compose the post. The result is the same: chaos! Or maybe you have always used Word and never had a problem before. There's always a first time. Blogger code changes constantly as Google engineers add fixes, enhancements and new features. Something that you could get away with yesterday may not be doable today.

A very simple rule to follow that will ensure you don't have any of the problems mentioned above is this: Don't compose your posts in Word.

If it isn't convenient for you to compose posts directly in the Blogger Post Editor, then use Notepad (for PCs) or Textedit (for Mac). Neither of these has formatting that will conflict with Blogger. Copy and paste into Blogger and your work is done.


Okay, if you must use Word, There are a couple of workarounds.

1. Copy the text from Word into Notepad or Textedit to strip off all the formatting. Then copy from Notepad or Textedit and paste into Blogger, OR
2. Copy from Word and paste into the HTML tab of the Post Editor. Then switch to the Compose tab to finish your post.

What if you have a post that exhibits one of the symptoms mentioned above? That's easy to remedy.

• Edit the post
• Select all [Ctrl A]
• Click on the Remove Formatting icon on the Post Editor toolbar (it looks like Tx)
• Preview your post. It should look a lot better now.

 If that doesn't fix the problem completely, you may want to try this:

• Edit the post
• Select all [Ctrl A]
• Cut (not Copy, because you want to remove everything from the post)
• Paste into Notepad or Textedit. That will automatically strip off all formatting.
• Copy and paste back into the Post Editor.

I hope this hasn't been too confusing. If it is, feel free to spank me. (There! This post was about spanking after all:) Questions, anybody?

A big thank you to Ronnie for the image at the top of this post.