This will probably be part one of many parts of how to mess up a Wordpress post. If you are a new user getting adventurous with some HTML coding when writing your posts you will want to pay attention to what I am going to say.
Today I learned how easy it is to mess up a Wordpress by not paying attention to which mode the editor was in when I was writing. I was trying to code some HTML into a page. I’m not really an HTML coder, but that doesn’t keep me from trying. It’s a very easy language actually– all you are doing is telling the browser how to render the text.
So I was trying to tell the browser to render it as bold by using the “strong” tag. I’d like to show you what that looks like in code, but whenever I put strong it in a < followed by a > all you’d see in that case is “”.
But I digress.
Here’s what the Wordpress HTML Text Box looks like when you select it
The big problem was that after I thought I was being so cool by actually coding HTML to make my words stand out the way I wanted I discovered that I was destroying the look of the entire template. Luckily, Dan, our computer scientist here at iDotMind.com was in the house and had enough time to help me figure out just what the heck I was doing wrong.
Thankfully iDotMind is owned by a guy with a computer science degree!
When he showed me I was pretty embarassed. It turns out that I was coding the Wordpress website post away in HTML but I was not in the proper HTML mode of the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor. I was in the “Visual” mode which acts more like a word processor for people who don’t know HTML at all and still want to have some basic functionality to bold or italicize text.
Dan quickly saw the problem. When he clicked over to the HTML tab there was a bunch of junk that was written. Lots of open “strong” tags and the WYSIWYG editor’s attempts at closing them and making sense so the page rendered correctly. Luckily, I only wasted about 5 minutes of Dan’s time as he patiently cleaned up my code for me.
Thanks Dan!
So the long and short of the important lesson I learned was to pay attention to which tab was selected when writing my posts, the “Visual” tab or the “HTML” tab. From now on I’ll take it as a hint if looks more like a word processor than a plain old text box.
Written By Evan McAllister
E-Business Strategist
http://www.iDotMind.com
This article be freely shared non-commercially under the Creative Commons
How To Mess Up A Wordpress Part 1 by iDotMind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
