I have noticed over the past few months that, sometimes, when I post or edit posts on my blogs (powered by wordpress, if you couldn’t tell), all of my paragraph formatting disappears when I hit save. It has already happened a couple of times on this blog, and a whole lot of times on my other sites too. Thankfully, since this blog is new enough, I was able to figure out the common factor for when the tags disappear – Safari (or Firefox) on my mac. If I use another browser, such as the one I’m using right now (Flock), everything works perfectly fine.

Apparently, however, this isn’t just happening to me. There’s a few threads at the wordpress support forums about it. The consensus is that TinyMCE, the editor that comes with Wordpress, is the culprit. Here’s the meat and bones of what happens:

You write your post out, spend an hour getting it all formatted just how you like it and you click save, or publish, etc. Once you do that, the paragraph tags are dropped as if they were never really there at all. Your hours worth of work, gone. All you get is a page long jumble of words – with no formatting, just a block of words. If you miss this, or don’t catch it for whatever reason – it makes you end up looking like a fool who can’t format or write for shit. This also happens if you switch from visual editing to code editing and back, all of your tags are lost. The end result is just not acceptable.

This is a pretty annoying problem, especially if you don’t know WHY it is happening. Before I found the support post online about the issue I had spent several days trying to figure out WHY this was happening. I could never figure it out. When I would switch from visual view to code view (to be sure the paragraph tags were there), they wouldn’t be. When I switched back to visual mode the formatting changes I had made were gone and I would have to start all over. I was getting angry enough that I thought I might have to reinstall WordPress to get things running again. Thankfully I found the posting that let me know I was not alone, others have the same problem. While that’s comforting that I’m not alone, it’s also frustrating how widespread the issue is. I hope Wordpress finally wakes up and addresses the issue. To my knowledge they’ve yet to acknowledge it yet.

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