Posting Tips

When writing an article, if you aren't composing within the Post window but are instead composing offline and pasting into the Post window, be sure no metadata overwrites your headline.  In the list of articles on the right side of the blog's home-page, a metadata overwrite will conceal your intended headline.  Fortunately, an overwrite can be undone by editing the published post.

I'm not sure what causes metadata to overwrite a headline, but my guess is that composing an article in a word processor, and pasting from the word processor into the Post window, retains the metadata at the top of the copy, and the metadata becomes the headline.

Perhaps the metadata can be purged by first pasting into Word Counter, then pasting from Word Counter to the Post window.  I have not proven this for the blog, but I use Word Counter in my work to strip out metadata, so am assuming this function holds true for the blog as well.

Formatting Your Post

For your heading, select your main headline text, then click Heading in the drop-down list.

To format the text, Normal is the default, but you can change the font and the font size if you don't like the default.  Bold, italics, underscore and strike-through are also available for emphasis and effect.  Text color and background color are available if you like.

To link to an article, use the Link option.  An example of this is the link to Word Counter above.  First, make sure the web-page you want to link to is open. Click the Link button to open the Link dialog box.  Copy-and-paste the web-page's URL into the Web address window in the Link dialog box.  Also click 'Open in new window' in the dialog box so when your readers have finished reading or using the linked web-page and close it, they don't simultaneously close your article.

You can insert an image, a video, special characters or a jump-head break (for continuations if your article is long, presumably).

Explore other formatting options to see what they do.  You can click Preview at top right to see what your formatting choices have created, and if you don't like them, go back to the Post window and make changes until you get the post to look the way you want it.

You can also edit your post after it was published, especially to fix formatting issues or to correct typos.