Wordpress and IE

Thanks again to the many folks using the Wordpress – WP.org forums for reminding me that copying and pasting from Word or another word processing app to a wordpress (WP) blog is a no-no. One of the back-burner jobs I finally got to this summer was to debug why my WP site was not showing the sidebar on the site homepage using Internet Explorer (IE). This wasn’t a problem in Firefox but so many of you still use IE.

Apparently, sometimes when you copy and paste text it, of course, copies some other Word formatting garbage. In doing so, you inadvertently copy the notorious “[if gte mso 9]” source. IE has a BIG problem with that.  To fix it in your WP site, choose the HTML tab  of the offending post and delete the extraneous garbage and voila, your posts and sidebar should be visible.

Also, veteran WP users (http://wordpress.org/support/topic/215124) recommend, that if you’re going to compose in Word, then paste your Word doc first into Notepad or simpletext or BB edit. Then save it and copy it from Notepad into your WP form.