How to format blog posts for WordPress
I receive a lot of guest submissions for another of my blogs. Many of these guest posts require extensive reformatting before I can publish them. Even when I’ve finished––and even for posts I write myself, WordPress does strange things. Here are some thoughts that should help you whether you’re submitting guest posts or writing for your own blog. The developers of WordPress seem to prefer that everyone compose directly in their editor. And now with WordPress 5.0 they’ve introduced a completely new editor called Gutenberg. “New, improved” is one of the most dangerous phrases in the English language. In my experience, it usually means that something I used to like has been changed to something I like less. The new Gutenberg editor puts each heading, each paragraph, each illustration, etc. in its own block. It gives bloggers more control over the formatting of each block, but it takes away some features of the Classic editor. For example, when you assign tags in the Classic editor, it will show you a tag cloud of the tags you have used most frequently before. It seems it should be simple enough to build the same capability into the Gutenberg editor, but they haven’t. … Continue reading →
