Thursday, September 03, 2009

Problem Solved

The new version of Blogger has been driving me batty since it launched a few weeks ago.  I do my writing for my blog in a Word document, often taking time to edit the slop I plan to share with the Internet (hard to believe, I know).  When I'm ready to put stuff on-line, I transfer the text from the document over to Blogger.

For more than three years, this has been a most satisfactory method.  Then some  smarty-pants techie at Blogger did some updates and it all went to hell.  Or so I thought.  Turns out there had also been an update to Microsoft Word such that when I did my cut-and-paste routine, it transferred some html coding information that messed with Blogger's mojo.  The upshot was that my blog font was screwy, spacing was a disaster, Blogger would often suggest that I had made a fatal! error!.  And I was cranky.

Then I discovered that other places where I do the cut-and-paste dance (e-mail; a teaching program called Moodle; who knew what else?) were also screwed up.

More crankiness.

In passing yesterday, I mentioned my troubles to the tech guy at my school.  And it was literally in passing...we were both busy and I mentioned it when P walked past me.  Within 20 minutes, he had diagnosed and fixed the problem.  The solution, for now, is to do my writing in TextEdit, a program that is already on my computer (an Apple MacBook).  It's a solution worth sharing, and so I am doing so.

I have to confess that I already had great fondness for P, the tech guy at my school.  He's funny and quick-witted, two traits I always enjoy in a person.  He always takes my problems seriously, even when they are lame, self-induced wounds (and it's none of your business how much that happens)  And he always fixes stuff for me. 

And now I have yet another reason to be nice to him.  Thanks, P.

1 comment:

sister AE said...

I hadn't got around to diagnosing this behavior yet. My work-around was to more cumbersome.
1 - write in MS Word
2 - paste into Stickies
3 - copy from Stickies into Blogger

ah, technology!