Word Documents Insert Bad Code Into Blog Posts
Do you write your blog posts in Word and copy/paste into WordPress or another blogging software? You shouldn’t and I’ll tell you why.
All MicroSoft products insert superfluous code that can mess with your browser or website html. It can jack things up in a hurry.
Here’s an example of the type of code that Word can insert into your blog posts without you ever even knowing:
Windows has come a long way in the recent years. (st1 :place)Vista(/st1) has been an influence on the tech industry all over the globe. There are many changes that come with Windows Vista. This include the look and feel of it, and the actual mechanics. Some have been really excited about the changes and others are convinced that Windows Vista is just plain evil.
(p class=”MsoNormal”)(o :p) (/o)(/p)
(p class=”MsoNormal”)Regardless of what people think,(/p)
(p class=”MsoNormal”)(o :p) (/o)(/p)
I’ve replaced all the < 's and >‘s with (‘s and )’s so that they would be visible to you. Otherwise, they would not appear on your page and stay in the background, pretending to be valuable code when, in reality, they are only impostors.
See the p class code? and o colon p’s? They’re useless. They mean absolutely nothing. They’re also MicroSoft. WordPress doesn’t like them. Why should it? They’re impostors and the search engines will likely not crawl them. They may not even crawl these pages at all.
If you like to write your blog posts in another document and copy/paste into WordPress I’d encourage you to find another method. If you want to spell check your blog posts then download Mozilla Firefox for free. You can do that here. Firefox will spell check all of your blog posts as you write them in WordPress.
If you don’t want to download Firefox and you use WordPress, you can write your posts in WordPress then copy them into Word and perform your spell check there. Just don’t copy/paste back into WordPress. Change the spelling of any misspelled words manually. This one step alone could mean the difference between getting your WordPress blog crawled or not.
6 Responses to “Word Documents Insert Bad Code Into Blog Posts”
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I write my posts in Open Office (but MS Word would work fine), copy and paste them into Notepad to convert to plain text, then copy into WordPress. A tad convoluted, but it works great for me.
~Adam
Explode The Net!
Thanks for the comment Adam. My experience has been copying from Word into Notepad still migrates code. Since Notepad acts as a text/html editor it takes the MS code and uses it the same way a web browser or html document would. It may disregard some of the code, but it does keep some of it as well. The safest way to use WordPress if you want to spell check your posts is to write directly into your blog software using Firefox. The Mozilla browser will spell check your posts as you write the same way that MS Word does.
I do like Open Office, though!
Just use html tidy. Also openoffice also produces garbage (read: non-semantic) html.
You guys are all riught, however, why not just write your posts right into wordpress and cut out all the other steps? LoL. Do you really worry that much about misspelled words? Here’s a thought. If YOU misspell a word, do you think someone else in the entire world might also misspell it the same exact way you do? If so, maybe you have a number 1 listing for that user and maybe that user even buys something.
When we are talking about blogging, it isn’t the same as article marketing. I believe articles should be spelled correctly. I believe blogs should be written and not too much emphasis put on grammar and spelling.
Now, that being said, if you are a truly bad speller who misspells dozens of words per page, then take the additional steps. If you only sometimes misspell something, leave it alone and let the other misspellers find you.
I did a press release for a client. Misspelled condominium. Had the number one listing for the misspelled version in google. How many people do you think found that press release because they misspelled condominium too?
Just my thoughts. Misspelled words are even bid on in adwords campaigns because people who misspell also buy stuff.
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Also, just wanted to add. I still use office 2003. I’ve never changed the formatting in word. still all on default settings. When I copy from word into wordpress, it does not carry any extra code into it.
I don’t use the rich text editor in wordpress. That may have something to do with it. The fact that I haven’t changed any of the default formatting in word may have something to do with it. Not sure why, but I can copy and paste directly in with no problems.
Just wonder if anyone knows the reason.