Word Processors vrs. Text Editors

Before.  See the blue and purple?

For our first Social Media Marketing Tip, I will share something that I just spent over two hours fixing in Blogger. My mistake is completely avoidable, but easy to make.

Tip: Word and Text Edit (on a Mac) are word processors not text editors (despite the name). This means that you should never copy and paste directly into the Compose screen on your blogger window. Always copy and paste into the Edit HTML screen.

What will happen if you accidentally do make this mistake? If you do copy and paste into the compose screen, the links will all appear bright purple and blue and there will seeming be no way to fix them. This may not happen right away, but when you change your layout or blogger changes, the blue links will likely surface and trust me, it is no fun to fix.

Why does this happen? Text editors are programs designed for editing text in a code format. As I mentioned above these programs are word processors, meaning they add their own formatting, in a code that is not HTML. When you try to use them as a text editor, what is called “junk HTML” or “crap code,” will show up. This is bad and can cause all sorts of problems later on.

Two and a half hours later.

If you happen to make this mistake, here is the blog post that I referenced to fix the problem. (Using the !important code did not work and I had to go though all my posts to find the problem.)

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