Blogging for Beginners

Despite the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get.) text editor that most blog hosting interfaces provide, many people choose to create their posts in their favorite Word Processor first. I have heard that it is because Word offers spelling and grammar checks, or because people have “lost” posts due to a web page malfunction. Well, here is my take on word processors – You have seen what food processors do to food, right?

I typed the paragraph above into Microsoft Word, then cut and pasted it into the interface provided after I logged into my Blogger.com account. A quick check with the preview funtion revealed that the funny characters I refer to in the title are not there.

Here is an example – sometimes the hyphen – when you create it with Microsoft Word, you use the minus key. Word is smart enough to figure out from the context whether you wanted a hyphen or you really wanted the minus sign. Unfortunately, some versions of Word, mine excluded apparently, use a character-encoding that is not alltogether web friendly. When you paste from one application into another, such as from Word to a web-based interface, the character encodings may not be compatible.

Two solutions: 1) Use the editor provided by your blog host. If it is a long post and you fear losing it, click the save as draft button often. Most mature blog hosts provide everything you need, including spell check, right in their application. 2) Copy your post into a simple text program like Notepad. Almost all Operating Systems come with a basic text editor. If your post looks normal there, copy it again and paste it into the interface provided by your blog and publish it.

If you still see crazy characters in the final result, edit your post and look for possible offendees like the single and double "Smart Quotes" or foriegn language characters like the ñ.

// posted by Alan @ 2:40 PM