My sister Abby, who is a children’s librarian, writes a blog called “Children and Books.” She does book reviews, writes about the librarian’s life, and other good stuff. Everything was going fine — until a week and a half ago when her blog stopped working.
First, she wrote to her Web host, Deerfield Hosting, to see if something was wrong on that end. Dennis of Deerfield Hosting (who is wonderful to deal with — he administers my Web sites, too) said he could find nothing wrong on his end, and suggested reinstalling the blog. Abby asked me to see if I could figure out what was wrong. I worked on the problem for several hours, and came up with absolutely nothing. At last we decided to back up the old blog, and reinstall it, as Dennis had suggested.
Except that Dennis wrote another email to Abby saying that he thought he had found the problem. Abby had posted an entry on her blog that she had written in Microsoft Word format, simply cutting and pasting the Word document into the blog. But Word embeds all kinds of peculiar characters in its word processing documents, and it looks like some of those peculiar characters bollixed the blogging software and/or the MySQL database on the server.
To make a long story short, I installed an entirely new blog on Abby’s Web site, and now she’s going to have to laboriously move her old blog over, post by post, to the new blog. All because Microsoft Word is a horrendously flawed product. I’m now looking for a new word processor for myself. And if you use Word, please don’t use it to write drafts for blog posts or comments.
Weird- I’ve been composing on MS Works and pasting it to my blog from post one without any problems.
I’m not surprised. This is why most webmasters cringe when a potential helper says, “Sure, I can help. I have FrontPage!” (Also Microsoft. Also throws in bizarre characters, rendering it unusable in a non Microsoft world.)
Thanks for clearing up the mystery!
And Dan, thank you so much for being my blog go-to guy. I was definitely in over my head – thank you for figuring out the problem and a solution. You’re the best!! (and Microsoft is pretty evil)
Joel — Well, Works uses a different file format which may not be as evil. Also, you’re hosted on Blogger, and perhaps they have Micorsoft-proofed their installations.
Lizard Eater — I had heard that FrontPage is equally evil, but have no knowledge of it myself. Given what you say, I’ll stay far away.
I use word to draft, but it word does weird things to me as well when I directly copy and paste into my wordpress…so I copy and paste to notepad first, then move it over. It messes up the “…”‘s but other than that it’s worked great.
We’ve had Word copying-and-pasting bollix up our church home page (because of the way I parse the RSS feed onto thehome page). I can’t wait to share your post with our Communications volunteers. In our case I was able to go in and delete the offending record, but that can throw off the database if you don’t know what you’re doing. Scary stuff.
My problem is not blog related, but is Word related. The hidden peculiar characters are also a problem when transferring documents from Mac Word to PC Word. The formatting is messed up about 75% of the time– and in bizzare, unpredictable, difficult-to-correct ways. Which is rather infuriating, since such formatting/transferring issues is why we bought the Mac Office in the first place.