Greetings and Salutations -

Thank you to all the editors who are writing to say they find the alerts helpful! I'm glad they're helping you to track down articles that aren't displaying properly. The more we can allow our visitors read our articles seamlessly on all styles of browsers, the better!

I've just enhanced the code so it alerts on additional formatting issues. This should help us ensure your articles are seen by as many people as possible.

I've also made the message the system sends out clearer. This way if you're not sure what to fix, you'll get some hints.

Here's the main three issues I've seen in researching this.

* Make sure the format is correct. It should read
Title Of Link

A number of editors are forgetting that ending at the end of the link title. Make sure that is on there.


* Make sure the quotes are up and down " and not angled. Only up and down quotes work in HTML tags. Often this happens if you write your article in Word and then copy-paste it. Word uses all sorts of special characters like curly quotes. Make sure you "save as text" in Word before you copy it over. If you can't tell what the quote is (angled or straight) because of the font your browser uses, try deleting the current quote and typing a fresh one in with your keyboard. Usually that does the trick.


* Make sure there are no hard returns / line breaks in the middle of your link code. It's ok if the line wraps naturally onto a second line. You want to make sure you didn't hit the RETURN key in the middle of it, through.

It might be hard to tell, by looking at something, if it's wrapping around the end of the line or if there's actually a line break there. Here's one way to tell. Put your cursor before the beginning
Another way to tell, if you're comfortable with using "view source", is going to your live article and doing a "view source" of it from your browser. This will show you the raw HTML of your article. Scroll down to where your link is. Our system automatically turns all hard returns into
commands so that editors don't have to code line breaks into their articles. If you have a
in the middle of your link, that's a sure sign that there's a hard return stuck in there.


If you try these things, save, and then you still get an alert message generated when you visit your article, let me know. I'm happy to take a look and help troubleshoot the issue.

Sincerely,

Lisa Shea, owner
BellaOnline.com

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