You may or may not know this, but you can do limited HTML markup in comments on blogs that run on the Blogger software (*.blogspot.com websites).

I will occasionally use tags (you can use lower-case or upper-case i’s, it doesn’t matter) to italicize text in a comment. I like to do this to another person’s text that I am responding to, so it’s clear the text wasn’t written by me.

Example:
What I type:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?

Fine, thanks for asking!

The text above gets displayed in the comment as:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?

Fine, thanks for asking!

Well, I noticed when I tried to italicize some text in a comment earlier this week that things are a little different. When I previewed the comment it looked fine, but when I actually published the thing there were no line breaks.

Instead, the comment appeared like this:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?Fine, thanks for asking!

Icky, eh?

Previously, Blogger was converting my line breaks into HTML line breaks, which are represented by the
tag. Now, it appears that they have modified their software. If Blogger now sees an HTML tag included in a comment, it no longer converts line breaks to the
tags recognized by browsers.

A little sidenote for those who want to know. A line break in an HTML source file does not equal a line break in a browser. Blogger does the heavy lifting of converting the line breaks that you make in your blog posts to HTML line breaks (
— case doesn’t matter here — it could just as well be
).

So, you have the option of giving up your use of italics in comments, or you can be a little amateur HTML coder and add a
to force a line break yourself.

Here’s an example how to do it:
What I type:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?



Fine, thanks for asking!

Which will display in a comment as:
Hey, how’s it going, Splotchy?

Fine, thanks for asking!

Anyways, I’m a geek. Happy commenting! Feel free to give this a try on this post, you nice people, you.

Try it with and without the
tags if’n you don’t believe me.

Okay, one last test. Though I am not promising this is my last test.

I predict that if there is only one word in a post title and it’s a normally omitted word, it will be used in the HTML filename regardless.

I imagine they have some extra little bit of logic in the Blogger code to handle this situation.

UPDATE:

Interesting! They actually don’t keep the omitted word, but substituted a generic “blog-post.html” as the HTML filename.

I imagine no one reading these test posts think they are remotely interesting, but I’m all geekily proud of myself. Good job, L’il Splotchy!

Another test.

This one is going to rawk.

UPDATE:

Oh Blogger I am so on to you.

The HTML file name is “an-a-the-an.html”.

A An The A An The A An The

Another test. You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?

UPDATE:

Name of the HTML filename is “the-the-the.html”.

I think my theory may be correct.

The The The The The The The

Hi, I’m just testing something here.

I don’t know if you notice this kinda stuff, but I do.

If you have “Enable Post Pages” set to Yes on the Archive section of your blog settings, each post you create actually results in the creation of a separate webpage.

The name of the webpage filename will be some form of what the title of your post is.

For example, for my Negative Space Signage Update post, the name of its HTML page is “negative-space-signage-update.html”.

There are rules which cause deviations from this naming convention. For example, if your post title is really long, your HTML filename will just use the first handful of words (if I am bored at some point, maybe I’ll figure out the length where the cutoff occurs). If your post title has punctuation, the punctuation is omitted from the HTML filename.

I have also noticed some common words (“a”, “an”, “the”) are omitted as well. For example, Here Come The Birds becomes “here-come-birds.html”.

Which brings us to this post. What if I have a post that only consists of words that are normally omitted?

I don’t know what’s going to happen.

So, I publish this, and hope Blogger doesn’t break. Although it would be kinda cool if I broke Blogger.

UPDATE:

Crazy… The title of the webpage of this post is “the-the.html”.

I’m wondering if the first “The” is disregarded, then it takes whatever follows the “The” as a word for the post title.

Something like this

The The The The The

Oh you can bet I’ll be testing this some more. More excitement to follow!