Friday, November 16, 2007

Deep Thunder Weirdness

I've been having some weird formatting issues over on Deep Thunder. I swear it is as if the HTML formatting code has developed sentience, malignant sentience.

I'm writing the story in MS Word (shut up!) and then cutting and pasting it piecemeal into the blogger editor after I'm satisfied that each published post won't back me into a corner later (which is why I have a lot more written than I have up on Deep Thunder, very strange way to write a story let me tell you. More like writing a weekly TV serial). Unfortunately, a bunch of buried HTML comes along with the text when you do it that way. Usually it's fairly benign, but once in a while weird shit do happen, so to speak.

I deleted the screwy post, pasted the text into notepad to strip off the coding, and copied that text (as ASCII text only) into the blogger editor. The weird formatting went away - in fact all formatting went away. And it would not, no how, no way, acknowledge the paragraph breaks. They showed up fine in 'preview' but every time I posted it, the text would end up in one big run-on paragraph. So I went back and edited the post in HTML mode, inserting the bracket 'p' bracket code for forced paragraph breaks. Again, looked good in preview, but it was one big mess when I posted it. Weird weird weird. I decided that troubleshooting and determining the actual cause was just too much damned trouble, so instead I applied creationist logic and decided that the problem was a curse on mankind for having sex and eating apples.

Snark aside, I think I've finally beaten it into submission. However I may be wrong. If you go by Deep Thunder, and it looks weirder than usual. Let me know here please. Thanks.

2 comments:

  1. Just blame Adam. After all, everything else is his fault...weeds, thorns, that original sin thingy...

    ReplyDelete

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