Blog editing problems

Am I and my select band of blogging friends and family the only
ones experiencing editing difficulties, somehow I doubt it.

Do you get sidebar intrusion? sidebar slipping to the bottom of your
page? HUGE print in compose when you are trying to edit a post?
does the finished post look like your preview showed you? no?
I thought not.

I have been experiencing these sorts of problems for about a year
now; in this time I have come to some conclusions that may help
others to overcome some problems.

First up though, let me assure you I am not a qualified Geek, I
stumble around the cyber world, often in a daze, but I am
reasonably persistent and on that score alone I have found a few
solutions that work for me, that’s not to say they will work for
everyone though.


First let’s look at sidebar problems;

Mine started to become more prevalent as I added more little
trinkets to my sidebar, but hey, it’s my blog and I wanted to keep
the things that made it mine.

That seems to work fine unless you try to include something that
exceeds the allocated width of your sidebar, (this is preset in your
blog template), often I have found with things like digital clocks
there are various widths available, choose small !!

Even something as simple as a line of characters like **********
(these will not word wrap as there are no spaces to seperate them)
can be a problem if they exceed the width of your pages boundaries,
(also set in the template.)

The content of your post can also impinge, I had a case in point with
the post containing the cartoon The Seven Dwarfs of Menopause, I
had cut and pasted this from an existing file which I failed to notice
needed to be cropped to fit my page, this caused sidebar intrusion
in some cases, Thanks for pointing this out Raggedy, BTW when I
cropped the cartoon and reposted it I lost the comments that had
gone with it…. Sorry.


Editing of posts;

When I cut and paste text from Word to my blog I find it’s essential
to ensure that the print size and font is the same for all material, I
sometimes use stuff I type with bits of an article or an email etc.
these may not be all the same size and font, STANDARDISE THEM.

When editing if you find the type has become HUGE in the compose
window, but not in the preview, highlight all the oversize text, then
go to the size icon and select “tiny”, now select “normal” again, you
may need to repeat and select a different font as well, should work.

If you are getting a word or two on a separate line of your post, go
back to edit, then preview note the word that ends the line in
preview and change the line in compose so that it agrees with
preview, as you scroll down while in compose anything that exceeds
the line length of the one you’ve changed should be changed too.


Posting photos;

I have a preference for selecting, “Center” and “Large” for my
photos, even though I would select them in the order I wanted to
display them blogger would often mix them up, I now find that,
provided I create a space above or below a photo I want to move,
I can drag a photo to it’s correct position, thus resetting my chosen
order, (if you happen to lose a pic doing this, hit the recover post
button and you should get it back, I did say should.

Difference in browsers;

I don't know whether this comes under the same category as "size
is important" or not, but different browsers read things differently
I use Mozilla Firefox and very much prefer it to Internet Explorer,
one of the main reasons being that it has far better protection
from the gremlins that just love IE.
Having praised Firefox I must admit there is one site on my links
that opens much clearer with IE, that's Mikes don't ask me why??
My advice would be, if you are using IE and having trouble, try
Firefox, it's free and it's good.


Text too small to read easily in a favourite post?

Go to “view” - text size – increase, repeat if necessary, as an
alternative use Ctrl + or ++ if necessary. these only work on web
pages by the way.


There are many more tricks of the trade out there I’m certain, if
anyone has found these helpful I am pleased, if anyone can add
more to them I will be delighted to host a forum which just might
make our blogging lives easier.


Any good ideas?