Archive for the ‘blog’ Category

Better WordPress Blogs at 1&1

Wednesday, August 17th, 2011

This blog is hosted at 1&1 where I use their default Blog option from my account’s Control Panel.  It works but is extremely limited and the web-based editing facility is cluncky and glitchy, while its resulting text layout is …well.. pathetic.  So I googled around to see what others have done about it – what am I missing?  It seems the best way is to create a fresh blog based on more current /comprehensive WordPress software working with the MySQL database that comes as part of the 1&1 packag.  Just one concern, before I leap into it: how do I migrate existing content off the existing blog (preferably retaining their existing timestamps) ?

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WordPress – Getting Spaces Between Paragraphs

Sunday, May 8th, 2011

Issues:

  • In this blog, I never moved beyond novice newbie level of WordPress use.   I’m using the WordPress service that comes as part of OneAndOne’s hosting.  I edit via their web-based editor, which I now realise is a widely used one, called TinyMCE.  That editor is frustrating to use, not only because it is fragile and clunky but in particular if I try to break text into paragraphs then it removes the break, producing a single block of text.  Surely there is a better way, but I have little time to invest in looking into this.
  • The main workaround I have been using is to employ bullet-point lists.  Each paragraph goes under its own bullet-point.  The result doesn’t look too great but at least it’s better than monolithic blocks of text.

But there are other ways.

The simplest, I just discovered right now (by making a fortunate  mistake) is to click the Indent button, even when there are no bullet points.  This seems to put the text into a paragraph-respecting mode.

I wish I had found this a long time ago!  Though it’s still a bit clunky/fragile, e.g. how come this very line didn’t get spaced only one line below the previous paragraph…

There is also another approach:

Can I upgrade the version of WordPress on my OneAndOne package?