CT Biz Blogs

As I wrote in an earlier post about not having time to blog, one idea is to “repurpose” other collateral you may have lying around, such as press releases, responses to RFPs, articles, or other informational pieces. It’s best not to use the whole piece, because blogs tend to have a more informal, conversational tone. But there’s usually some bits that you can either use verbatim, or as a spark for a new post.

If you’re going to copy a Word document into a blog, you’ll need to take a few extra steps, though. That’s because the commands that Word uses to format a document are not the same as the code web pages use to format a page or post. It may look good when you’re creating the post, but when you hit “publish” all heck can break loose. In some blogs, like Wordpress.com, Word can really mess up the template. Suddenly the pages look funny, with the sidebar at the bottom, or the calendar wrapping oddly because the text is wider than the template can accommodate. And even if you’re only pasting in a few words from the document, unless your font is the same as the blog font those few words will be in, say, Times New Roman, when the rest of the page is Verdana. Very untidy!

You can output a Word document to HTML, and then try to copy that, but the code is so encrusted with extra junk that you run the risk of really confusing your blog if you copy the Word HTML into the blog writing interface.

One work-around is to copy from Word into a text editor, such as Notepad, which comes with all Windows PCs. I’m sure Macs have something similar. And actually, I’ll bet there’s some cool way to avoid the problem altogether, on a Mac. Once you’ve pasted into Notepad, you can copy that and paste that right into the blog writing interface. The secret hidden formatting voodoo that Word uses, and which can scramble your posts, will be gone. Then you use the blog interface to re-format the post.

Another trick is to use a program such as PureText. This nifty, free application strips the code out for you so you don’t have to do the extra Notepad shuffle. Once you’ve installed it, just clicking on the PureText button will clean the text you’ve copied from Word while the text is still in limbo (otherwise known as the “clipboard”) between the copy and the paste.

It’s a little extra work, but it makes a difference in how the blog looks.