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When was the last time you read your own blog’s RSS feed in a reader? Do you even subscribe to your feed? You might want to check what the folks who follow you are seeing.

In the most recent versions of WordPress, the code that aligns images with text in your blog posts has changed. While your posts look fine on your blog, they probably loose their formatting when being sent out on your RSS feed. It’s very likely that the image sits in its own paragraph, isolated from the associated text, which usually appears below the image instead of beside it.

There is a workaround for this problem. It’s not exactly a kosher fix, but it does resolve the problem for most feeds. A WordPress plugin has been designed by Janis Elsts called Align RSS Images.

It scans your RSS feed and ensures that every image has the correct alignment and margin settings. Basically, it appends the WordPress generated code with HTML elements that most all readers can use without error.

So, get the plugin and make your feed look as good as your post. Your followers will be delighted.

There are two ways to create a link in your WordPress post. One way takes folks away from your site. The other, more advanced way, ensures your site remains visible to your reader.

Both the post and page editors allow you to enter content by using either the Visual mode or HTML mode. Using the HTML view mode only allows you to create a simple link. This is also the case when you use Quick Edit or make updates via your phone.

Using the Visual view mode allows you to select from advanced settings, and that’s what we’ll cover here.

Once you highlight a word or phrase in your post and click the link icon, the window shown to the right appears.

The first line is for the URL of the link. This is the only information you can enter while in the HTML viewing mode.

The Target option is the key to keeping your site available to your readers when they click on the link.

When you click the drop-down arrow you will be given two choices of what happens when the viewer clicks the link (shown right).

The first option is for the link to open in the same window. This is the default when no target is set. What this means is that when a viewer clicks on the link, the page they are currently viewing will be replaced by the linked page.

That may be fine if you are redirecting viewers to another page on your site. But, if the link goes to a related site, you’ll want to choose the option for opening the link in a new window. Most browsers now support multiple windows open. Using this option means that your site will remain available to the viewer without them having to click their browser’s Back button to see it again.

You can also give your link a Title, which helps with SEO, or Search Engine Optimization.

The Class option allows you to further format the link by choosing where it will be aligned on the page, adding a caption, link to a remote Gallery of pictures, or embed rich text media such as a video. The last two options are available on WordPress versions 2.9 and above.

If you use Word to write your drafts, you’ve probably encountered formatting issues when copying them to your blog or other online posting outlets. Here’s a trick that will strip all of Word’s internal formatting and produce clean copy on your post.

Behind the text you see while creating a Word document is a set of code that contains all of the formatting information to correctly display that text. Many times when you copy and paste from Word to an online posting source, that formatting gets carried along with it. At that point, you have two choices. You can either manually remove all the Word formatting, or start the habit of saving all of your Word documents as plain .txt files.

There’s an easier way.

All blog platforms give you a text editor with two ways to enter the information.

• In Blogger, the two views are Edit HTML and Compose.
• In WordPress, they are Visual and HTML.

Pasting the contents from Word to the HTML view strips it of all formatting leaving you with a clean copy. You can simply return to the Compose or Visual mode to easily re-create any special formatting, such as words in bold or colored text or links.

One of the other tricks I’ve found helpful is to include the full URL of a link in the Word draft. That way, it will be easily available after pasting in my blog editor. It will usually look something like this:

Visit Just the FAQs (http://www.JustTheFAQs.net) for more helpful resources on blogs and websites. Be aware that on WordPress, entering a link in the HTML mode has less options than in Visual mode. Look for another blog post on that soon.

Using the HTML mode for copying lets you save your drafts as a Word document without having to create a second plain text version or manually having to remove extraneous formatting.

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