Question re WYSIWYG Editor for Posts and Response

Your first mistake is using Word. Never, never, never, post to anybody's site using Word as your editor. That is something that will really tick a website owner off!

Microsoft Word puts all kinds of garbage in the code that is behind the formating of what you create. It can really mess up a web site. As a matter of fact I am having to go back through all the blog posts because a couple of them are messing up the formatting of the site.

There are tools specifically made for posting to forums and blogs. You should look into them. I use ScribeFire which is a Firefox plugin. There is also a tool for Internet Explorer/windows called Windows Live Writer. It can be used on it's own or as a plugin to IE7 live toolbar. 

The great thing about these tools is they allow you to post to your blog (or anything else that uses the standard blog API) while you are on another piece of content. That is, if you are browsing another site/blog and you want to write about it or resond to it in your blog, you can just bring up the tool and it provides special funcitonality for quoting and using trackbacks for the site you are blogging about. When you are done you just hit the submit button and it posts it to your blog without having to surf to it.

These tool can also be used to compose forum posts where you can copy and paste or insert into the forums editing interface.

But the bottom line is, if you already have an WYSIWYG interface on this site, why not use it instead of going to the trouble of composing one place and pasting it into the editor.

Also, there are two buttons that can help everyone make sure their posts are ready to submit. The first looks like a little paint brush. When you hover over it the tooltip will say 'clean up messy code'. The other buttong looks like a little grey eraser. It will say 'remove formatting' when you hover over it.

You can select all the words in your post and click one of these buttons (or do it twice, one time for each button) and it will clean out all the garbage. This will leave your post as pristine as possible.

Why do we care about all this? Because in case we have visually impaired folks use the site, the tools they use will behave much better on a site that is clean (code-wise).

But please if any of you are using MS Word as part of your posting process, please don't do that here. Or if you must, please use both of the above mentioned buttons to make sure the post is cleaned up before submitting it.

Thanks!!!!! 

Todd, I just downloaded Live Writer and installed it. It did require a few answers that I had to guess at, but it seems to have worked.

I tried a sample post to my blog and it seems to have worked. I'll try it out further and provide further information. But right now it seems to be the answer for Windows users who want to add entries to their blogs!

Glad to hear the writer worked for you. It is a neat tool. And no we shouldn't start a Microsoft bashing party as I used to make a handsome living off of them.

 But to anyone else out there (Ron included), there are applications written that actually scan site content for MS formatting and remove it. It is such a big deal that most Content Management Systems have such a feature built in.

I am working on widening the response editor and adding a spellchecker. There is also the capability to make the editor go full screen.  

Todd,

Can you recommend another editor that will work with older versions of windows, like Win 98.  Sorry, my computer was made when the dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Moose

Todd  will these 'tips' work for the Private Messages as well? All my PM's look like strings of spaghetti!! Verrry irritating reading such PM's. TIA.

PM's are plain (unformatted) text.

URL's will become active hyperlinks.

If you paste formatted text, it should only show as plain text, and any hidden formatting code should be cleaned when it is sent.

As Bryan suggests, a screen shot showing what you get would be a help.