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Using An External HTML Editor

  1. aloony
    Member

    I'm new to blogging but in almost every other website that accepts HTML code I've been able to prepare my posts in my HTML editor then paste them into the website's text boxes.

    That doesn't work well on WordPress. There are linewraps in inappropriate places, font sizes don't display correctly, images do odd things, etc., etc, . . .

    Why doesn't the html that works almost everywhere else work here?

    Has anybody written a post on using an external editor to create one's blogs? If not, maybe one needs to be added to the FAQ.

    The WordPage text editor is cranky too. For example, it doesn't recognize my backspace key. I have to move to the front of what I want to delete and use the Del key. Sometime it stops responding to the Del key too. There are other examples.

  2. timethief
    Member

    @aloony
    Is it possible that you are writing your posts in that gawdawful Microsoft Word program that has it's own unique version of html? If so, then that's your problem. It supplies all kinds of extra strange formatting garbage that wordpress programming strips out.
    There are two wordpress editors so if you do not like the one that you're currently using (Tiny MCE - visual rich text editor) you can turn it off and use the other one.
    To turn it off -> dashboard -> users -> your profile (uncheck the box for the visual rich text editor) - > update profile.
    I turned Tiny MCE off months ago and currently write and upload all my posts by using the free open source editor available on the web called Blogdesk http://www.blogdesk.org/en/index.htm It's optimized for the WordPress blog system and very easy to use. You can also use it to post simultaneously to more than one blog.
    Other people prefer to use various off line editors too so perhaps this is the direction you may want to go. Simply do a google web search under blogs and you will find a huge number of reviews of the various off-line editors. The newest is a Microsoft product - Windows Live Writer.

  3. aloony
    Member

    Thanks for your reply.

    No I'm not using Word. I've very aware of the trash code it creates. I'm using FrontPage and it has some poor syntax but, as I said, it almost always works well on many other websites.

    I'll look into BlogDesk, the editor you say is designed for WordPress, but it will mean learning another application.

    Maybe someone else knows why standard html, that works elsewhere, doesn't work well in WordPress

  4. drmike
    Member

    Might help us help you if you told us what HTML you were having issues with. The WordPress editors have a number of security checks that you might be running into but without knowing what you are actually trying to put in there, we can do little but guess. Being pointed at an example on your blog and comparing it with what you tried to get in there might help as well.

    As per TT, I would also suggest turning off the rich text editor/ TinyMCE and using the normal editor as well. That way you can have more control over your code. TinyMCE, like Word, is known for putting strange codes in there as well.

    For reference, BlogDesk was not written for WordPress. It's a cross platform program that works on a number of systems. You would have the same issues with that as it goes through the editor so I don't think you would be having any differences with using that.

    Again, for reference, here's the list of allowed HTML codes here at wp.com. Other tags are removed from all user input due to security concerns.

    Hope this helps,
    -drmike

  5. aloony
    Member

    Ok, that may explain why I can't find a way to get BlogDesk to do one of the things I want to do -- change font style and size.

    BlogDesk does seem like a handy tool but it doesn't seem to do more that WordPress.com does.

  6. drmike
    Member

    WordPress will let you use the font tags though. Could have sworn that you could use them with Blogdesk as well though.

  7. aloony
    Member

    Yes, you can change the font manually in the code, but that's tedious. It's erratic how it handles this. Sometimes if you change the font at the beginning it changes for the entire text other times it only changes for the remainder of the paragraph and you have to change it at the beginning of each paragraph. If you change it for a few words in the middle it behaves in an inconsistent way too.

    It seems like there should be an editor somewhere that lets you use all the supported features and handles the htmll code for you. Oh, well . . .

  8. drmike
    Member

    We run into issues with folks here in the forums getting their entire blog with different fonts and strong tags and whatnot when they start messing with more tags as well. If you don't keep it in the back of your head that they're there, you can run into problems. :)

    Another thing you can do is if you pick up the CSS upgrade is change the default fonts used of course. I don't know if you feel comfortable with $15 a year per blog just to change the default font though. For me, I got it just to widen one of my blogs. (Well, I got comp'ed but still.)

  9. tlesser
    Member

    Has anyone figured out how to "adopt a pet" into his/her wordpress site using bunnyhero labs?

  10. drmike
    Member

    You're going to have to explain what you're trying to do here . Only my ex assumed that I could read minds and I do hope you're better than my ex and her mother.

    Like maybe a link or showing the code your trying to add in or even a link to where this code is displayed so we can see it. :)

  11. drmike
    Member

    I think this may be the site that you're talking about. They appear to be flash based. Flash is not allowed as it's a security risk. If it was allowed, someone uploading an hacked flash file would put your blog at risk along with all the other 430k blogs here and I don't think that's something you would approve of. You can find a number of threads on the subject.

    Hope this helps,
    -drmike

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