I’m currently building a website through WordPress that will bring all my multiple personalities together in one space. I haven’t started to design the visuals; I’m just working on importing content right now. I’ve already discovered several annoying things about the interface.
 

Here’s the weirdest one: WordPress won’t let you put an extra space between paragraphs. You can put one space, the equivalent of <p>, but you can’t put <br><br><br>. Even if you’re in HTML view, the editor will render your <br><br><br> invalid. It’ll assume you’ve made a horrible mistake and want only one space. I tracked down the name of this function after trying several search strings in the Codex: the wpautop. The entry for wpautop gave me two lines of code to negate the wpautop, and I put them into my theme immediately.

Of course, now I have to code everything manually. I’d rather do that and have some control, but it does mean a lot of line-by-line work. Which brings me to the footnotes. Footnotes are best when you can link the intertextual note to the endnote, but it’s a pain to code all those links.

The page editor has two views, HTML and Visual. To save formatting time, I decide to paste the Word document into Visual and then switch to HTML. The editor has a built-in converter that will encode Word artifacts like footnotes. It’ll be easier this way.

(I submit a new entry for the dossier of Famous Last Words: "It’ll be easier this way." It can join the ranks of such notables as "It can’t get any worse" and "I know what I’m doing.")

Unfortunately, when it converts I end up with these ugly brackets around the footnote numbers. So I go through and add superscript tags to all the footnotes. It takes a while, but it looks much better.

Then I think to test a footnote link, and discover it doesn’t work. I look closer at the code, and realize that WordPress has given me <a href="#_ftn1"> for the intertextual reference to link to <a href="#_ftnref1"> at the end. What HTML world are you living in, converter? So I have to go back to every one of those footnotes and replace the code with the correct tags, which are <a href="#foot1"> and <a name="foot1">.

Next time I’m writing my own.
 

In case you didn’t realize: I love this. I love wrangling with HTML and building an intricate structure tag by tag, a giant interlocking system of code.