dibs

3stripe
Yes, but I can’t activate Askimet because it requires something called “WordPress.com API key” which I don’t have. Nor do I know how to get one. I follow the instructions for finding out my “WordPress.com API key,” but there is no such thing where it is supposed to be.

The instructions say,

“Every user of WordPress.com gets a unique API key they can use to access a number of services. This key should be as kept as secret as your password — don’t share it with anybody.

To find your key go to your dashboard and then click on “Profile” (or “My Account”) and you should see a sentence that says “Your WordPress.com API key is:” followed by a string of 12 letters and numbers. There you have it!”

More like “There you don’t have it!” There is no API key mentioned in that page for my blog.

What is an API Key?
Where do I find mine?
Or, how can I get one?

moshu — Sorry about the long code post. Didn’t know it was discouraged.

Anyway, thanks for the links; I attempted to follow the instructions in the articles, and though at first I was bedizened by the foggy prose, and could make neither head nor tail of it, I was inspired to continue fiddling, and with some inspiration from WordPress’s support articles, I did cobble together a technically ugly but eventually successful rendering of image captions, as can now be seen on https://www.dibsblog.com. So, problem solved for me. Thanks.

Otto42:
Thanks for the extra info. You actually explained it more clearly in one paragraph than did dozens of other people on various Web sites I looked at. If I had seen your comment, it would have saved me hours of work. You have no idea how densely incomprehensible the “explanations” are for people like me who have no clue what PHP even stands for, much less is.

Even so, after I successfully installed it, the Widgets thing just didn’t work for me. I like the way my sidebar is now, and so far haven’t found any use for the Widgets. I did finally get the RSS feed thing going to my satisfaction (you can see it here: https://www.dibsblog.com). I find it simpler and more intuitive to rearrange the components by hand cutting and pasting in the sidebar.php file, than by doing the weird interface.

Otto42:

OK, following (or attempting to follow) the instructions in the link you provided, I was able eventually, after dozens of false attempts, to get the Widget thing working. (Those Widget instructions are extremely un-user-friendly, especially for non-programmers like me.)

Anyway, even though I got it working, I ended up not liking the look and feel of the Widgets, plus the main reason why I got it — to put RSS on my sidebar — didn’t work for some reason. Instead of spending another 5 hours trying to get RSS to work with this widgets thing, I’m simply going to undo everything I did and start all over again with a new question — this time specifically about RSS feeds.

Thanks.

geoffe, Les, WP admins:

I strongly suggest that wording be changed. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have misapprehended it — I’d be willing to bet that a substantial percentage of commenters here have been bamboozled by the instructions under the comment box.

Here’s my suggestions for what it could be changed to:

Allowed tags: <a> <em> <strong> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <blockquote>
Placing “backticks” (i.e. backward accent marks) around any characters in your comment will cause them to be displayed as text and not be rendered as code.

or something similar. By actually showing the < and > symbols in the “Allowed tags” line, you show how to format the text; and by rewording the “backticks” section, you make it comprehensible.

Hope that helps.

alrescha:

Thank you! That worked like a charm. All I had to do was change “ALIGN=LEFT” to “class=”alignleft” and I got the appropriate spacing.

I knew it was easy.

Problem solved.

Les:

If you want the code to be rendered, enter it as normal

Oh my God! So that’s what the instructions mean! “Backticks” = NO code works.

I’m pounding my head on the table here.

Waiiiiiiitttttttt a minute. I think I have the whole thing reversed!

Are you trying to tell me that the “backticks” negate the effect of the code being typed?

My experiment above seemed to suggest that conclusion!

I have been assuming for months that the phrase “Put code in between backticks” indicated that one must use these mysterious backticks for formatting code to function properly in posts. Since I didn’t know what a backtick was, I never tried it.

But now it is dawning on me that the “backticks” comment has nothing whatsoever to do with the text formatting for the comment itself — the text can in fact be formatted the normal way. The “backtick” stuff is so one can input code into the comment that then WON’T have any effect.

If this is truly the case, then I must say that “Put code in between backticks” has to be the most confusing instructions ever written.

WordPress — I’m sure there are thousands of people who have the same misapprehension as I do. Please think about clarifying the wording of the instructions below the comment box — as it now stands, it only serves to make things more confusing and intimidating.

Testing:

Yummy in italics

<em>Yummy in italics</em>

emYummy in italics/em

What???
Now that’s crazy. Now, the word “Yummy” IS bold in the comment above!! But all I did was copy the code from the previous comment (in which “Yummy” was not bold) and paste it in.

I’m very confused.

What do you see? Both in your comment and in mine, I see these characters:

Yummy

None of them are “bolded” or “strong.”

I put backticks around the whole thing (like so, indicated with single quote marks):

‘Yummy‘

Hmmmmm…really? I never would have guess that. Let me try it that way. Here we go:

<strong>Yummy</strong>

Still doesn’t work for me.

See? Didn’t work for me. On my screen, I get this:

strongYummy /strong

I.E. I see the code, not the formatting results the code is supposed to do.

When I typed “strongYummy /strong” I put “backticks” around the “strongs”, but they disappeared when the comment was sent.

Still mystified.

LesBessant:

Yes, the character you describe is indeed below the tilde in the upper left corner of the keyboard. However, that was the first thing I tried — I called it a “backwards accent” in my question. Putting code between these characters appeared to have no effect on text formatting for me.

For example, I will try it here — the following word “Yummy” I will try to make bold using the character you describe. Here we go:

strongYummy /strong

Let’s see if it works!

chradil:
Thanks. I got your email with the edited CSS file.
I see your visitors stats, so I won’t worry too much about people with narrow screens. From your stats, only 1.9% of people have screens that are less than 800px, and those people are probably very used to having web pages wider than their screens anyway.