Adding line breaks in WordPress, and stuff like that

Found a nice little plug-in today that gets rid of an annoyance in WordPress.

Normally, if you try to add extra vertical space, either by hitting enter in the visual editor or by adding <br /> tags in the HTML editor, WordPress just strips them out, so you have to do some extra work to get them to stay in. What I just found out about is a plugin called TinyMCE Advanced; one of the options in it is to turn off that behavior, which it does by replacing your <br /> tags with <p><br /></p>. Sure beats doing it by hand!

It also lets you add more buttons to your toolbars, for things like tables, non-breaking spaces, justification, etc. I’ll probably be coding a WordPress site for the charity that Brit does the website for in the next few weeks, so this should be a useful thing to throw in to make it easier for them to edit their own posts.

Up to 1 year free webhosting at 1&1

I’ve been using 1&1 webhosting for about a decade now; I got in on a “3 years free” package they were offering and never saw any reason to leave afterwards. I actually ended up upgrading from the basic plan to their $10/month business plan, which includes 3 domains and 250gb of web space, and I have about 30 domains with them. Someone who just wants to hold a small personal site would probably be happy with the beginner plan, which provides 10gb of space for $4 per month. As of last year, all plans offer unlimited bandwidth.

One possible issue is that while they provide a reasonable number of mySQL databases (50 with my plan), they are limited to 100MB apiece, which may be restricting for large dynamic sites; I’ve only recently started putting up WordPress sites, so we’ll see if that actually becomes a problem.

Anyway, the current promotion is 1 year free for a home account (150gb, 2 domains, $7 per month regular price) or 3 months free for the business or developer accounts. If you’re looking for a new provider, they’re probably worth a look.