I continue to learn more about how things work between WordPress and Steemit when you connect the two via the steempress plugin. My first post on this topic is: Lessons learned from my WordPress and steempress setup.
It’s a really fun learning curve, I have to say. I’ve been testing some things to better understand how the two blogging platforms handle tags and so on, in order to continue providing more information to other steempress users. The fact is, these are two separate platforms that have different ways of handling markup. So it’s amazing to me that we have this great plugin for connecting the two and that it works so well.
This post is about the additional things I’ve learned since I launched my WordPress site and begin posting from WordPress to Steemit.
(Image source: Pixabay.)
Fun with steempress – more tips and learning
In case you didn’t see my first post on discoveries I’ve made, here’s a summary of what I covered:
- Overview of WordPress and the reasons people are setting up WordPress sites to collect their Steemit blog posts.
- Things to think about (design, content architecture) as you set up your WordPress site.
- What the steempress plugin does.
- Things I’ve learned in the process of setting up WordPress and connecting it to my Steemit blog.
- How to avoid re-posting old posts back to Steemit when you load them on WordPress.
- How to avoid posting two of the same image in your Steemit post with WordPress’s “featured image.”
- My bizarre blockquote misadventure (which I now believe to be user error). More on that in this post.
Here are some new tips and revelations for you, in no particular order.
Updates to WordPress after publishing don’t affect the Steemit post
This may be obvious, but I thought it was worth mentioning. As I said in the first post, you can inadvertently post the same image twice in your Steemit blog post by setting one of the images as the “Featured Image” in WordPress. This effectively puts two instances of the same image into your Steemit post.
The answer is to set the featured post after you initially publish it. The reason is that if you make changes to your WordPress post after you publish it to Steemit, your Steemit post is not affected. So there are two take-aways here:
- If you want to set a featured image in your WordPress post (so that it appears in a summary on one of your pages with an image instead of a gray box), first publish the post without a featured image. Then edit the WordPress post, add the featured image, and update the post. The update will not change the Steemit post.
- If for any reason you do want to edit both instances of a published post — the one on your WordPress site and the one on Steemit — you need to make the change in both places.
You can control Steemit tags, only if you do this
I have tried a few different tactics now, regarding tags. And here is my finding: Steemit does not order your tags the same way you ordered them when you published the post on WordPress.
For example, let’s say you add the tags like this: steem, blog, humor, life. When it shows up on Steemit, it might be: humor, life, steem, blog. You can always edit your tags in Steemit, but you can never alter the first one in the list, which is technically the most important one. It’s where your post is categorized on Steemit. So if you care about that, this is a good thing to know.
Here’s how to control your tags. Only add the most important tag to your WordPress post. Pick whatever tag you want for your post category on Steemit. Go ahead and publish the post on WordPress. Now do these two things:
- Add any additional tags that you want for your post on your WordPress site and update the post.
- Edit your Steemit post and add any additional tags you would like to be associated with your Steemit post.
If you don’t care which one comes first, then there’s nothing you need to do, other than write, tag, and publish the post.
A few additional tag-related tips:
- It may be silly to even mention this, but it’s a good idea to use at least one tag on WordPress that matches a tag on Steemit. Otherwise it will not have a known category on Steemit.
- In WordPress, you can have two-word tags, like “baking tips” or “true story.” Steemit simply conjoins these into one-word tags: “bakingtips” and “truestory.” This may be something the @steempress-io developers cleverly set to behave this way, since you wouldn’t want a two-word tag to become two separate tags.
- I haven’t tested this, but I’m going to assume that if you add more than five tags to a post, Steemit will pick up five of them in a fairly random fashion.
Pay attention to block quotes
I first thought, based on a what happened with a 50-word challenge post where I quoted several authors, that Steemit can’t handle the WordPress blockquote tag. But that’s not the case at all. I subsequently did a test post (in which I quoted the unlikely grouping of Shakespeare, Churchill, Ayn Rand and Robin Williams), and they worked fine.
What gives?
I believe the troubled post with the nested block quotes was user error. And I think I know how I did it. But if my theory is true, I don’t know why it appeared okay in WordPress. (If you have ideas, please give me a shout.)
Here’s my theory: I somehow inadvertently added content in the WordPress post between the beginning of the blockquote tag and the end. That caused blockquotes to nest inside one another, as I described in my previous post. I will do more testing to make sure my theory is correct, but here are a few tips:
- To ensure that you don’t inadvertently nest content inside a blockquote tag, add all your content to your post and then highlight one paragraph at a time as a blockquote and click the blockquote button in the WordPress toolbar:
- Check your tags by looking at the post code. Make sure everything is as it should be by clicking the Text button (upper right corner, above the toolbar). Look to see that there is only one blockquote tag per quote, and that the beginning and end tags are where they should be.
Steemit does not open links in a new window, period
One of my favorite nifty features of WordPress is the ability to set links to open in a new window. This means when someone is reading one of your posts, if they click a link in your post, they don’t leave your content. They get a new window. (Well, at least in a browser on a computer. I don’t think it works that way on a mobile phone.) This is great because you want to be able to reference other content without sending people away, especially in the middle of a post.
You can’t do this on Steemit. I’m hoping it’s a planned feature. But at this moment, in July of 2018, Steemit links take you away from the post you are reading.
I tested to see if maybe the “open in a new window” feature would work in Steemit if you set it in WordPress. But as I suspected, it does not work.
Thanks for reading! I am still on a huge learning curve. If you see anything in this post that is incorrect, please let me know.
