A Complete novice, but help would be most appreciated none the less
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Hi there,
I have joined in the last 24 hours. I’m quite amased too at the July WordPress stats re numbers and types of postings etc. I spotted on their landing page.
Anyways my teething problem is a simple one…I have got myself a nice background/formatted solution from WordPress’ options..the one I chose was Vostok. However I can’t see that such a format has any flexibility to do basic document manipulation. The two simple changes that I would like to do are;
1) I had been writing in Word already and my document size tends to be 5-10 pages on A4 word document. However cutting and pasting this amount of words into the main body of the template make the WordPress article seem bulky as the words all appear as one long page insted of reverting to another top of another page as would be the case in a normal book/article.2) Secondly Vostok have some great font for totles (orange on a black background I quite liked). However there did not seem to be any way to copy the format to take the heading format to other part of the document as it’s imbedded in the design feature of the template I suppose.
Any help with these matters would be much appreciated..and good luck to you all,
PhilThe blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Please don’t paste from Word!!!
Word may be a “great” word processor for print, but it does not speak internet. It adds all sorts of unnecessary junk code which will break your site.
Suggestion: the “Paste from Word” or “Paste as plain text” button to add your text to posts.
Suggestion: use an offline editor. LiveWriter is recommended by lots of folks as having the same feel as a wordprocessor.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/Big suggestion: work through this tutorial so you become acclimated to this WordPress.com platform:
http://learn.wordpress.com/I don’t understand your second question. What is totles?
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Okay, Okay titles!
Here’s the post and if you go to preview you may see the practical problems..
Pil
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My words are already in Word Tess, does this mean that those articles now have to be re-written..surely not!
Phil
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You can copy-paste them.
It may be possible for an off-line editor to import text from other documents. I write directly into the text editor and have never used an offline editor: another volunteer will chime in with their experiences I’m sure.
BTW, I cannot look at drafts: staff can, but we volunteers can see only published posts and pages. You could set your site so search engines won’t find it yet have it public so we can help you. But it’s more efficient when we can see exactly what you are doing.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/settings/privacy-settings/
option 2:Ask search engines not to index this site. – If you want all human visitors to be able to read your blog, but want to block web crawlers for search engines, this is the setting for you.
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Here is more info about LiveWriter:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/xml-rpc/windows-live-writer/It doesn’t answer the question of whether or not you can import text from Word, though. I’d suggest you start a new topic to ask that question so other volunteers will see it more quickly.
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Hi Phil,
Sorry, but I see no posts or pages on your site. Have you published your article? -
It’s in draft form…do I have to publish it to discuss its formation?
If I publish it can I take it down because it may end up being for commericialised purposes? I’ll publish it now as it very unlike to be read inthis form but then am signing off for the night..
Phil
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Yes, as I said, we volunteers cannot view drafts; we can see only what is published / public.
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Hi Phil,
I must get to work, so I’ll be away for a while. But there are lots of volunteers so go ahead and publish. You can publish a pseudo post or page if you don’t want your actual text online yet:
This is a handy tool for experimenting with how a post or page will look:
http://www.lipsum.com/ -
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Great. So I have a couple of ideas about how to break up the long and difficult to read on screen paragraphs of text.
- First, and perhaps the most simple, is to use the read more tag:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/more-tag/
That will truncate each article so readers will see only the first few lines (or however many you choose) before facing the whole article. When they click the “continue reading” link they will see the whole long text.
Benefit:
you can show lots of different articles on the front page.
Drawback:
readers still see all that text. - Second: Vostok will show custom excerpts on category and archive pages.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/excerpts/
Benfit:
you can show a summary you write yourself about each article.
Drawback:
Vostok does not display custom excerpts on your front / home page
And readers are still faced with a long page of nearly unbroken text after they click through to your post. - Third: Break your articles into smaller parts. You can categorize a group of posts so readers can access all the sections. I’m not familiar with your topic but I write about Japanese cooking. So, for example, if I had an article about my favorite Japanese cookbooks then I’d break it into separate posts—one for each cookbook and add a tag or category to each post. That way readers could find my entire series of articles on that topic by clicking on the tag “Japanese Cookbooks”. Access could be with a category widget or a custom menu.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories/
http://en.support.wordpress.com/category-pages/
Benefits:
Readers won’t face a very long and difficult to read page of text. You can further categorize or tag each section with folks would use to find your article.
Drawbacks:
This may be complicated for an author to edit articles into sections. or you may not want to do that. I’m not sure what your ultimate goal for your blog is.
This may be difficult for a beginner to do without more research into how this platform works (though really, it’s not hard once you get the idea of how it works). - Fourth: Use pagination so readers see only parts of your page at a time. http://support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/nextpage/
Benefits:
The long text is broken up into smaller easy to read sections. It’s also easy for them to read page 1, then click on consequtive pages to keep reading the article. Also you don’t need to learn about categories and tags.
Drawbacks:
Readers do not easily see the links to following pages because of the way wp.com formats those links…
You can make custom links to following pages with some html coding so readers will notice and use them. But as a newbie this may be intimidating. - Fifth: Venture into a little tiny bit of coding to add color to titles of the sections of your long articles.
for example:
<span style="color:#FF9900;">TITLE_OF_SECTION</span>
You’ll have to switch from the Visual Editor to the Text Editor (html) to use that code.
Benefits:
Readers can easily see where different/ important parts of your article are. The long text is broken with a visual signal that there are sections; easier to read and keep track of where you are in a long text page online.
Drawbacks:
You’ll have to venture into the text editor. - Also a thought: you could us page jumps. At the beginning, or as a custom excerpt, or part of the read more tag you could have a sort of index to the sections of each article so readers can choose which part they’d like to access.
http://support.wordpress.com/splitting-content/page-jumps/
drawbacks: perhaps too complicated for a newby, perhaps not what you want to do…
- First, and perhaps the most simple, is to use the read more tag:
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