Just when I thought things were going great with the blog and my writing, I find out that my new installation of WordPerfect 12 (up from version 10) reset the “Smart Quotes” function back to ON. DAMN!
For those who don’t know what this means, it means PAIN IN THE ASS! Smart Quotes is a feature available in WordPerfect, MS Word and other word processors that wants to help you by doing the thinking for you. It just “assumes” that you would want lovely quotes that artistically quote to the left and right around what it is that you want quoted, like a sentence. This is the style found in books and magazines, so they expect you want it.
What Smart Quotes does is converts your keystoke quote into a left or right curved quote mark, computing whether you are at the beginning or end of a quoted line.
This is all fine and looks pretty for most people, but for those who do EVERYTHING in WordPerfect, including writing blogs, code, and HTML and CSS, the converted code pastes into WordPress bogs as the stylized quote which looks pretty on the page when published, but isn’t recognized by HTML code. The results aren’t pretty. Inside of anchors for hyperlinks, these cute curved quotes aren’t recognized and my links over the past 10 blogs (since installing the new version) all result in a Page Not Found 404 error.
So I had to go through and change the default setting in WordPerfect to turn off Smart Quotes and then go through and replace ALL the quote marks in the last 10 or more blogs. Ugh.
Apologizes to everyone who clicked on a link and found themselves looking at nothing. It’s all fixed now.
Mobile, Alabama