Fixing Those FeedBurner Problems Part Two: MSWord Code

It's wonderful, all those options to make your font look just how you want it to, not to mention spacing and little smilies and symbols.  I used MSWord for all that and then copied and pasted my post here into Blogger.  But, according to Validator, it's not that great of an idea.  While it doesn't stop FeedBurner from reading your post, it can pose some possible problems.

The <o:p></o:p> is the biggest bugger I've encountered with this.  From what I understand (and I'm far from an expert on coding all this stuff, so do not take me as the authority here), it's an MSWord code that this program takes as extra coding and not necessary.  Actually, there are a lot of codes that aren't really necessary and Validator recommends you cut your HTML down to the bare bones as much as possible without hindering the intended display.

I had 368 occurrences of this code in my posts.  And I have to say, my eyes bulged when I went to remove them.  How in the world was I supposed to catch every single occurrence within all that HTML?  Then, I got thinking.  (Love it when that happens :D Lol).  I don't really want to use MSWord to set up my posts since I have to remove the offending coding once I enter it in Blogger, but code is code.  If I enter it in the HTML side of posting, it takes it as literal input.


What I did:
Copy post from the HTML side.
Past it onto a blank Word document.
Select Replace on my Word toolbar under Edit.
For the Find What: I typed in "<o:p></o:p>".
For the Replace With: I typed in " ".  That's right, a blank space.
Hit Replace All.
Copy all from the Word document and paste into your blogger post on the HTML side.

Tada!  Now, sometimes Word separates the code.  So, I went back and did the "<o:p>" and the "</o:p>" individually.  It picked up the stragglers.

If you're wondering why I didn't use NotePad to do this like I mentioned in my earlier post, I started with that and it was taking forever.  It would only find one at a time and I had to correct and then go to the next.  That's when I had my epiphany. *wink*

I hope this helped a few of you.  Really, I'm finding that some of this stuff is just clean-up and won't effect RSS feeds.  But, Validator states in several explanations on removal of these codes that some are "potentially dangerous" and could "cause unwanted side effects in browser-based news aggregators."

Next time, I'll go over some of the other codes they flag and list the ones they "white list."

Oh.  I got the cute smiley codes from http://www.desismileys.com/, by the way.  Much cuter than MSWord.

Until next time, may your dreams be magical.  

      Charlene