why is blogger adding empty divs to my posts?
what is up with blogger? blogger has always been this great free service, and they should be credited with bootstrapping the whole self-publishing phenomenom and making it easy for people to host their blog with minimal technical background required.
and then pyra was bought by google. and then evan williams left and went on to start odeo.
and then for some reason last thursday, june 23, they began injecting some html into my posts that wasn’t originally in my very custom template—the template that allows me to include my blogger-powered neatlinks sidebar into my wordpress-powered blog. it wasn’t a big problem, just a minor annoyance that forced me to remove the little pound sign links to my permalinks.
what they’re doing is adding divs to the beginning and end of each post in order to prevent weird layout problems that might occur between posts as a result of images and floats.
<div style="clear:both;"></div>
post content here, blah di blah di blah…
<div style="clear:both; padding-bottom: 0.25em;"></div>
this is cool, but this is a change that should occur at the template level, and not by adulterating my post content. which means you and i don’t have any control whether that html shows up or not. so if you want to import your blogger posts into wordpress—as someone i helped today did after blogger’s change borked his blog—guess what, those empty divs get imported too.
this was a crap call on their part, and guess what, my support request to them has gone unanswered, as every previous thing i’ve sent to them has.
i can sympathize. i’ve been @ work this past month customizing wordpress to my own likes, and i agree that blogger shouldn’t be screwing with your posts in that manner. however, i’m on the brink of having a plugin to tack on facilities for the creation of a clipblog, linklog, linkblog, neatlinks, whatever you want to call them sidebar. with easy one push link addition… but within wp. hope cali is nice, i’ll be out in a few weeks to look at berkeley.
ha, look who it is. and when did you start hacking wp?
So when are you switching to WP? I’m glad that I did.
my main blog is wp, and i’m kind of waiting for wp to support multiple blogs before migrating neatlinks over…
hacking wp? ha. about a month ago. but the question should be, when did wp start hacking me… my frustration stems from working on a blog all of june that i can’t get out of beta… thus my capacity to actually blog has been quite limited. a ghetto version will be done by tomorrow.
good luck.
I got whacked with this problem this morning. Irritating. Anyhow, I found a solution in Blogger under Settings – Formatting…for the cryptic “Enable float alignment”, set it to “No”. Looks like there’s a potentially useful “Post Template” field there, too. (Wouldn’t it make sense to have this under “Templates” instead of “Settings”)
wow, great detective work terrie. apparently this was a hack to solve problems with their new image hosting service. notice that post is dated only a few hours before my post but a week after the “solution” first appeared.