WordPress editor woes

Using an online editor is the equivalent of rolling (unloaded) dice. You write your best post ever and then hit the save button and everything disappears. Or, you get it formatted just the way you want it, hit the save or publish button, and all or most of your hard work formatting goes away and you are left with a single long paragraph. Since online editors do not keep a copy of your post or page on your hard drive, you are pretty much out of luck in these cases.

There are many reasons your hard work can vaporize. It may be an internet network issue, or a server issue at WordPress, or it may be due to a problem with the editor code itself, or any number of other issues. The online editor that WordPress uses is TinyMCE. This visual editor is still not compatible with the Safari browser and paragraph formatting will disappear when you hit save, save and continue, or publish. Lately though, this problem has been occurring with other browsers as well; Internet Explorer 7, Firefox (both on Mac and Windows). With Safari you can turn off the visual editor by going to users > your profile and deselecting “use visual rich text editor” which will keep paragraph formatting from being stripped out, but this is not a very desirable option for most people since most people are not familiar with writing HTML code.

The real solution is to get an offline editor in which to do your blogging and there are many free editors out there and even those that are not free, are reasonably priced. The beauty of an offline editor is that it saves a copy of your page or post right on your computer hard drive. If your post should somehow disappear from your blog, it is simply a matter of opening the offline editor and republishing it.

Timethief has a great round of of offline blog editors, as well as a very good post on “Disaster Planning” at her WordPress Resources Blog with links to the various editors. Save yourself some frustration and grief and give one of them a try.