Maybe Post Formatting is WordPress' Fault, Not Posterous
I've posted a couple of comments here in recent weeks griping about the fact that when I use email to post to my blog via Posterous, formatting gets munged. In almost all cases, e.g.,. the blank line between the first and second paragraphs gets eliminated. I know that's probably not a big deal to more than a handful of folks on the planet, but for better or for worse, I've spent so much of my life as a professional writer and publisher, that the formatting errors just bug me.
This morning I decided to probe more deeply into what's going on and I'm now convinced the problem is with WordPress or perhaps the editor I'm using in WordPress. I haven't seen this post yet, of course, because I'm drafting it in email, but the immediately preceding post about the Democrats and God was my case in point.
When I posted it, there was a one-sentence first paragraph that just cited the New York Times article. When the post appeared on my blog here, the blank line was gone, though there was a line break at the end of the short first paragraph. So I went into my WordPress Dashboard, edited the post and inserted a carriage return into the WYSIWYG editor. I updated the post and checked it. No change (yep, I refreshed the browser). I re-edited the post, this time using the editor's HTML view. I entered explicit paragraph tags for the second and third paragraphs, updated the post, viewed it in my browser. No change. I wondered if the problem was with the Safari WebKit rendering engine, so I looked at the post in Firefox. Same problem.
I re-opened the post in HTML view in Safari and imagine my surprise when the two paragraph tag pairs I'd entered at the last step were gone! I replaced them, updated the post, and then re-opened the post for edit to be sure the tags were still there. They were.
Now, I'll allow for the possibility that some of this may be due to my upgrade to WordPress 3.0, but I'm skeptical since I was experiencing these issues long before the upgrade. I had begun using Dean's FCKEditor to replace WordPress' built-in editor but that plugin appears not to have been updated to work with the new WordPress.
All of this really serves to illustrate my long-stading reluctance to introduce seams into my workflow. Here, I'm passing an email to Posterous, which is updating my blog, so I have two seams (email-to-Posterous and Posterous-to-WordPress) to cross. Seams are just places for things to go wrong and get lost. I don't want to give up on Posterous, particularly if WordPress is the issue, but I cannot afford to make yet another blog switch; every time I do, I lose audience share.
