Friday, September 22, 2017

Tips to Seraphin on Inserting Images and Formatting for Blogger

The previous article stands for the safest way to embed images in Ithaka since, more than likely, any other way (i.e. drag and drop) means Blogger will almost certainly bugger it up.

Assume a long-winded article on the sorry quality of much modern consumer software and Facebook is the easiest punching bag since it screws up constantly.  (The Guardian:  Instagram uses 'I will rape you' post as Facebook ad in latest algorithm mishap)


When you see an image and text is apparently stuck to it even when you did not add it as a caption, that's the symptom of a buggered-up Blogger and the only way I've found to get past it is to delete the image and start again.  If I don't want to delete any text to start again, the first move is to copy the stuck text to your Clipboard buffer but don't delete it yet.

Put many, many blank lines between the offending image and anything which is formatted normally.  I'll use at least half a dozen for that because the thing is so damn stupid.

Then I can remove the image and the stuck text safely.

I'll also delete any blank space between the coherent text and anything else or the top of the screen since the previous attempt will leave rubbish HTML behind and you want to lose all of it.

Then add those blank lines just as you did previously.

At this point you can proceed as I had advised in the previous article by using the icon for an image in the Blogger edit bar.


This is more geek than you likely need since drag and drop clearly uses a different code path from the insert mode since drag and drop won't center the image but insert via the icon always will.  There are few things which will generate contempt from other programmers faster than using different code to accomplish the same thing.

We don't need a diatribe on shabby software since that just is and we have better things to do.


There's also a different symptom of a severely-buggered blog since a new article may wind up in making all others following it disappear.  The first law, as always, is don't panic since the other articles are not gone.  It's only that Blogger is buggered and you can't see them.

The offending article may appear properly formatted and satisfactory but I've yet to discover what code within such an article causes the problem.  Locating and deleting the article is the most immediate solution.  You may want to keep the article you deleted since, wtf, it got to the point at which you thought it was good to publish.  However, I found creating another article by pasting the previous article into it will create the same problem so something in it is definitely bugged.

As to locating the offending article, it will be the one after which the others disappeared but I think it's also possible for the first of the disappeared articles to be the culprit as well.

The problem doesn't occur much and I've seen it at the most maybe half a dozen times since I started the blog and that estimate may be high.  As from the top, the first law is don't panic.  The blog is not gone and you will be able to recover if you stay cool about it.

Hopefully your young and agile mind can find the actual cause of this problem but it's not a crash priority because, as I say, it doesn't happen much.


Your never fail ace to recover from anything is the full blog backup which makes a fully portable copy of the blog to reload it somewhere else, for example.  Our interest is in restoring Ithaka should something major ever happen to it.  You will find his handy tool via the Settings tab of the Admin panel and that will reveal the following:


The option for Back up Content will take every molecule of the blog to export it to some ancillary file and you can drag that one wherever you like to preserve it.  Using that source, you will always be able to restore everything in Ithaka back to the time you last took this kind of backup.  With that in-hand, you can restore Ithaka via Import Content to be the exact image it was when you last backed it up.

Again, don't panic since I'm lackadaisical about taking this backup but it can't hurt to be aware of it and you might want to back it up relatively soon so you always have the knowledge you can also restore at least back to that point.  It almost certainly will not be necessary.


Have a ball, mate, and can't wait to see you and Tinkerbell tomorrow.  That should be one great jam.

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