Blog Writing Habits: Can I Break My Blog?

I thought this question was cute and it touched me deeply. As a recovering techno-idiot, I remember many times I was afraid to click a button for fear of "breaking" my blog. Guess what? It never happened.

One of our students in our mentoring program asked about copying and pasting from a Word doc into their blog. So I thought I'd remind all you new bloggers and non-techies out there: don't do this. Anytime you copy and paste from a Word doc, an email, or a website, there is hidden coding. When you paste into your blog software, it codes your text automatically for you, so that means coding on top of coding - not good.

What you get is double coding - once from your original document, and once from your blogging software. End results are helter-skelter and crazy formatting. Best to delete that post and start over since you can't really fix it on the blog.

I know this is elementary for most of you, but anyone can get busy and forget this important step: whenever you copy, be sure to strip out the hidden coding by dropping your text into Notepad first, then copying and pasting out of Notepad into your blog software. On a Mac, your plain text editor is called something else besides Notepad but I can't remember what that is.

Comments

[John Hewitt]

Actually, the newer versions of Wordpress come with a function for pasting from Word. It works quite well. It strips all the useless code but keeps things such as bold text, italics, lists and headings.

[Cath Lawson]

Thanks for mentioning this. I really struggle to edit my blog - poor eyesight and all. So I recently started copying and pasting from Word. I had no idea that it could cause problems.