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I have noticed that my posts has a lot of missing html tags and generally the html code is garbled and has, somewhere in the blog posts I have wrongly placed html and xhtml, tags left open and many other tiny mistakes which we usually do when we write our posts.
What makes things even worser is that I use to type my blog posts from my server shell using nanoblogger. Thereon the blog post is imported into wordpress.
The resulting garbled html has many implications on how the user visualizes this posts but maybe the most crucial consequence is that the produced xhtml output has many errors and therefore it’s not compatible to the w3c html standards.
In one of my previous posts I have talked about the natural results following a non w3c compliant html websites and how that would reduce pagerank and the overall indexing likeness and search engine interests into the particular website.
Therefore I wanted my wordpress blog to have as less errors as possible and looked for a plugin that will be able to produce information about my blog posts errors and incompatibilities with the official html standards and possible allow me to easily automatically resolve the xhtml incompatatibilities.

Some research in Google on the topic on how can I solve my post warnings and errors has led me to a nice wordpress plugin to cleanse your html garbage and errors called tidy-up
Tidy up does walk around all your posts and creates a list of xhtml incompatabilities, errors and warnings as well provides with an automated way to resolve html warnings and errors inside your blog articles
This is pretty quick and handy. Since using the full automated features of tidy up might be a good idea, I personally preferred to use the plugin in a half automated way, by requesting tidy up to report about my post issues and then following each of the warnings or errors and using the tidy button or the edit button in order to fix each of the problematic post areas.
Here is a screenshot on the simple but functional tidy up interface:

Note that in order to be able to use wordpress you will also need to install tidy on your system
Installing tidy-up in wordpress is a piece of cake and is absolutely identical to the normal way we install a new wordpress plugin:

To install download tidy-up.zip to your blog/wp-content/plugins directory and unzip the tidy-up archive:

server:~# cd /var/www/blog
server:/var/www/blog# wget http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/tidy-up.zip
server:~# unzip tidy-up.zip

Then in your admin panel in wordpress go to:

Plugins -> Inactive and Enable the Tidy Up plugin pressing the enable button.

To start using the plugin navigate to:

Tools -> Tidy up
Now enjoy cleaning up your html from irregularities 🙂

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Tags: Cleanse wordpress posts from xhtml and html warnings to improve your blog SEO using wordpress tidy-up plugin

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 1st, 2010 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Linux, SEO, System Administration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.