Formatting Fun

Nov 13 2008

As I was composing yesterday’s post, I was exremely frustrated with how the formatting turned out. In case you hadn’t noticed, the paragraph after the RSS icon is squished, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to fix it. It’s happened before, and it’s only been happening since I switched to WordPress. I’ve been thinking about this, and I think I have come up with a huge point:

When I was on Blogger, I hated their WSYWIG editor so I always composed my posts in html. I’m using the Advanced TinyMCE Editor here, which is a much fuller-featured WSYWIG editor than the basic WP insallation offers.

So could that be it? Could it be that writing posts in code is the key? I am also not a huge fan of the “Insert Picture” feature, but if I link to a pic on my Flickr page and use the “Insert Link” feature, the picture placement is much more to my liking, and the text doesn’t butt up against it.

Now if I’m going to be writing all my posts in html, I’ll really need to brush up on my skillz. In the first 6 months or so of having this blog, I had a lot more computer time that let me play and learn. I don’t have that kind of time now to experiment with everything, so I have to make do with what little I remember.

While I was playing around in the code this evening, I did manage to do a couple of tweaks. I took out the icky dotted underline and changed the color of links to make them more noticeable, and I put a small border around my pictures. Eventually I’d like to customize a template the way I did on my old Blogger blog, but besides the time issue, WordPress and its multi-faceted templates intimidate me. PHP is still a very foreign language to me. Maybe one of these years I’ll have time to sit down and figure it all out, but right now? I just need to keep writing, and hopefully without my post formatting getting all messed up.