There are various fixes for at least the typeface, but they either take a bit of doing, or they are not permanent. Both wind up being really annoying, especially if you have something you really want to say, but are stopped in your tracks because you can’t see what you are writing. Or something like that.

Anyway, to the rescue! Cleaner WordPress Editor, which I am using right now, makes things so nice. The editor screen is wide and clear, the font is large enough for me to see, there are no widgets in the sidebars because there are no sidebars (all the stuff, like “publish” and so on has been moved to the bottom of the page.) All in all, it just makes writing in WordPress a so much better experience.

Mind, I realize that now I have one less excuse. Whoops.

I have not been writing here much, partially because I didn’t want to get too distracted. But I also noticed that it was just such a pain to try and see what I was writing, because the font size in the little “new posts” box was just microscopic all of a sudden. And it is annoying, to me, to have to write something somewhere else and then transfer it here.

Well, I have finally found a fix for *that*! It’s not elegant, but it doesn’t take much more than a lot of clicking (to get to the correct file) and then deciding on the size of the font and whether you want serif or nonserif sans serif (I am going to change to non sans serif, and also play around with the spacing once I am done here.)

This fix is courtesy Monkeylytics, who says:

After some some Google search sculpting, I finally landed on one post that showed me the way: you have to change the CSS of the TinyMCE editor which is what you use to write your blog posts on WordPress. Unfortunately, I couddn’t find the CSS file from within WordPress which means I had to log-in to my hosting service and change the files there. On my WordPress installation, the path to the tinymce CSS file is:

[some path to your wordpress top level directory]/wp-includes/js/tinymce/themes/advanced/skins/wp_theme/content.css

(yeesh)

The text block looks like:

body.mceContentBody {
font: 13px/19px Georgia, “Times New Roman”, “Bitstream Charter”, Times, serif;
padding: 0.6em;
margin: 0;
}

And then change your font size to whatever makes sense for you. In my case, it was changing it from 13/19 to 19/19 (probably a little too big). Save your changes. Force reload the page in your browser to make sure you get the new styles loaded, and you should be good to go. So, instead of getting something eye-straining like this:

After which she or he has a couple of visual examples.

And it works! So, theoretically, I should be posting more, now that I can see what I am writing.

If you are having trouble seeing the text, try this. If you need help, feel free to comment or email and I will do what I can.

(P.S. It’s a good thing I remembered that the term is “sans serif” not “non serif” or whatever it is I put, before I changed the file. I have updated the post.)

A Google search turned up the fact that this is a common problem, with a couple of solutions. One is guaranteed to cause the eyes of us non-techie types to glaze over, so once I found that one I kept searching… and came across a simple, elegant fix.

Andrea_R, in this comment, says:

This is a well-known issue. It only happens in a sulbfolder setup on the main site in the network.

No need for rewrite rules to add more overhead, just go to Super Admin -> Sites, edit the main blog and remove the /blog.

So I did exactly that, and voila! Links fixed.

Go to your SuperAdmin (at the top of the screen, with keys), click “Sites”, then “edit” for the site in question.  Once you are on the “edit” page, scroll down a bit until you get to “permalink structure” and just remove /blog, click “update options” at the bottom of the page and it’s done! Yay!

Also, as it turns out, Andrea_R has a WordPress Tutorial site that I will be making use of!

What I love about this calendar is the point-and-clickability of it! First, you just choose “Calendar” under your “Posts” menu and when it comes up, just pick a day – any day! – click and a place to write a post will come up. You title your post and start writing and it’s automatically saved to your drafts. Should you decide that you don’t want to post whatever it is on whatever day then all you have to do is drag your draft thingy to a new day, and there it rests until you come back to it again.

Um, I’m pretty sure the developer can explain all that better than I can, so make sure to read all that when you go get your copy.

So, what am I going to use it for? Why not everything!? Okay, almost everything related to my work (and planned work) online. I can schedule posts for this site, Human Beams, and the Book of Louis on various days, then work in my other writing work – paid or for classes and stuff, and have a good idea of what I need to do when. Plus, instead of writing something when I schedule it I can either just put the title there and the germ of an idea, or do a quick outline so that when it’s time to write I will not have forgotten what in the world I was planning to write about. As I have done, far too often, when I just put a catchy title and nothing else.

Oh, I forgot that not only does it keep track of what you plan to write, but also what you have completed and posted (on the site it is plugged into, at least, but that’s good enough to begin with.)

Anyway, all I have to say (after having said all that) is… Editorial Calendar plugin – LOVE IT!

I found a solution today (or maybe it’s a workaround) within WP though. If you hit the enter key in the editor, it gives you a large gap between the paragraph above and your new paragraph. Saving that makes it disappear for some reason, like I said above. If you hit enter and get the big space though, and then hit the backspace key, you will have a paragraph break without a huge line break. The important bit here is that it actually saves!

And it works! I don’t know HOW it works, but it does. Thing is, I used it on one post, and the paragraphs posted fine – but it also fixed the previous posts, where I’d used the   fix, and now those are double spaced! Why, why, why? Dunno, havent’ a clue, who knows the mind of the WordPress coders, but anyway – will fix those when I have time.

Now, the real test is this post that I am writing now – will it, since everything else was apparently fixed by the one backspace, too be fixed, even after the fact? OR, will I have to use that trick in this post as well to get the paragraphs to show up – and if I do, will it then cause the previously fixed post to go to double spaces, while the aforementioned html fixed ones go to triple!?

Only time (and clicking “Publish”) will tell. So, here goes…

UPDATE: Hah! It works, without doing the backspace thing. How weird is that?

Sigh.

Update: Fixed! Yay! Note – if you try to install the wordpress ‘recent comments” widget and you wind up with a fatal error something like – Fatal error: Call to undefined function mw_recent_comments() – the fix is to download the most recent “get recent comments” plugin and follow the installation instructions. Worked like a dream for me – but it was really hard and time wasting to try and find the fix.

Now to figure out how to add paragraph breaks w/o manually inserting the p tag and   between each paragraph.

What a pain. I wonder why this software isn’t out of the box ready.