Recently someone I know had a problem with her new blog. She was happy with it and then a friend told her that the blog wasn’t working and that nothing could be seen.  The problem? Her WordPress blog worked fine… in her Firefox browser. But in Internet Explorer, it was broken… Text was missing, funny code-like stuff like "<!--[endif]-->" is displayed, etc.

What happened? Well, she had written her blog entries in Microsoft Word and then copied and pasted the text into the WordPress editor. Unfortunately, Word can put code into what you type (it’s hidden) that when pasted into WordPress can fowl up in IE. WordPress has a Support entry explaining this and how to fix your posts. Please visit http://wordpress.org/support/topic/205637 to learn the specifics. (If it’s too “geeky” for you, drop me a line and I’ll translate )

When you write an entry in your blog there are a couple of ways to do it. You can just type it into the WordPress editor and format it there… You will avoid these kinds of problems.

If you write your post in another program, like Word, you can copy and paste, but don’t just paste it into the WordPress editor. Look at the WordPress editor and you will see two buttons, (for paste from text) and (for paste from Word). If you press “W” and paste your text into the window that pops up, WordPress will apply the formatting from Word so that your post will look like what you have written in in Word… Although there may still be problems as noted in the WordPress Support link above.

If the above still causes you problems, try typing your blog entry in Word and save it as a text document. Then open that file in a text editor like the Windows’ Notepad and copy and paste into WordPress from Notepad.

It’s always good to look at your blog or website in both Firefox and Internet Explorer as well as other browsers, like Opera and Google’s new Chrome – They don’t always present your site in  the same way!