Help with blog that looks weirdly formatted on GR

[Salomé]

Hi,

I'm helping an author friend get her various profiles set up. She has a blog on Wordpress.com. She's connected it to her GR profile, but the text comes out somewhat wonky and there are about five or more blank lines between paragraphs. None of this appears on her blog. I have gone in and looked at the html there and I can't see anything that would be making this happen. . I looked around for answers and checked out what suggestions I found. I still can't get it to work properly.

Here's her blog: https://roxanedhand.wordpress.com/blog/

Here's her GR author profile blog: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...#

Any idea how to fix this? Also she pointed out that it doesn't show images on GR. I looked at my own blog and saw that it does show images on GR. Many questions, not too many answers. Thus I pass it on to you.

Thanks for your help. (If there's anything to do on her end, I'll do it for her. She's a bit of a luddite.)

Salome

[J.]

I'm no expert on any website designs. One thing that comes to mind with the wordpress site is how you have the various paragraphs identified as because there are different types of headings or as a paragraph. I seem to remember that some of those settings put extra space between things that may show up elsewhere. As for the pictures, that's a mystery. You might try asking the librarians.

[Salomé]

Thanks. Yes, they're paragraphs, but Wordpress doesn't seem to allow you not to make them paragraphs. Ergh! I'll ask the librarians though, thanks.

[rivka]

While our wonderful volunteer Goodreads Librarians can assist with book records and (unclaimed) author profiles, they cannot help with general site functionality, like author blogs. Goodreads Librarians are volunteers, not staff, and have no access to author tools.

[Christopher]

I may be able to shine some light on this, though it may not give you an easy solution. GR doesn't take your blog posts straight: they go through a translation. Wordpress takes your posts and creates a feed from them, a universally-understood format called an RSS feed (or another type called Atom). That's what you give to GR to consume (a URL for the feed).

So there are two sides to this: (1) how the posts get reformatted on your site for the feed, and (2) how GR consumes the feed and presents it.

Your original blog posts are mostly just paragraphs using "p" tags, which is good. Those "p" tags are the correct way to create paragraphs. But after your post ends up on GR it has those same paragraphs plus many break tags (and sometimes extra empty paragraphs). Something is adding those "br" tags - like I outlined above, either on your site or on the GR side.

My site isn't Wordpress, but it has the same kind of feed, and I've had my own problems with how it shows up on GR. Luckily I write code for a living so I was able to directly alter how my site puts posts into the feed (it was a template which I changed to strip out images etc.). My feed only shows a small amount of the post text with an ellipsis, not the whole post, so stripping things makes sense. But I couldn't solve a problem on the GR side: whatever consumes the feed on GR can't handle even regular UTF8 accented characters, so they show up garbled. Apparently it's a bug on their list.

My advice to you would be to look carefully through the Wordpress admin to find what is handling the feed you are providing to GR. The less you give GR to parse, the more control you'll have. Maybe there are settings you can change (strip HTML and/or images?), or a better plugin to handle it for more fine-grained control? Just guessing. Good luck.

[Christopher]

https://codex.wordpress.org/Customizi...