Never let your prime writing material for your blog post end up disappearing because of an online editor crash.

Before posting your precious work for your blog, write the post using an external editor like Word or Textpad or other tool. This way you can take advantage of the word processor power, spell checking and grammer checking take place before posting. As well, you will have a back up copy in the event that your blog platform crashes while you’re writing, or after you press the “Publish” button.

Why am I telling you this? Because the very same thing just happened to me and I needed to remind myself why I write in MS Word first. I had decided to write up a quick post with a paragraph or two, but it turned into an essay with lots of affiliate links and such. Then I entered some Amazon affiliate information into the post, using the “Code” tab, and POOF! Away it all went.

I have been in the habit of writing first, then copying and pasting into my blog editor after running the text through a text washer. I use notepad to wash my text. I call it text washing because as I used to teach my student, copying directly from word into your html editor brings a long a great number of MS Word formatting crap. It looks like text, it smells like text and it feels like text, but have a look at the underlying code and there’s a bunch of crap that needs to be washed out. Notepad is a simple editor that removes the extra formatting for you before you paste it into your wordpress editor window. A client of mine, a writer from Wyoming calls it “taking the text for a bath”.

I’ll explain “washing your text” in another post.

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Tags: Blog Posting Tips, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Wordpress, Writing Tips