If you know HTML/XHTML, skip this post. Just pass go and head directly to Big Shot City. We’ll wave as you pass.

If you use the Visual Editor in WordPress to write your blog posts (as opposed to the HTML Editor), then it’s pretty simple. The world is at your fingertips. You can highlight something, press “i”, and it italicizes. Brilliant. You can highlight something else, press the chain-looking button, and create a link. Easiest thing in the world. What you see is what you get.

Pretty much.

But have you ever tried creating an extra space between two paragraphs? You push “return” and then “return” and then “return” again. In Word, it would show up as a big extra space. WordPress ignores it. (There’s a good reason for that, but you don’t need to fill your brain with such nonsense. Suffice it to say, it doesn’t work.)

The easiest way to insert a blank space is to switch over to the HTML editor (I promise…it’s not that bad). Put your cursor at the end of the paragraph that will be before the extra space. Hit return twice (as if you are starting a new paragraph). Then enter the following:

<p> &nbsp; </p>

Basically, what you’re doing is starting a new paragraph (<p>), putting a space in that paragraph so that it’s not empty and WordPress doesn’t ignore it (&nbsp;), and then ending the paragraph (</p>). Here’s an example of what it will look like in the HTML editor.

One time, I wrote a whole paragraph about how awesome I was. It was a short paragraph.

<p> &nbsp; </p>

Oh look, when I publish this post, there’s going to be a bunch of extra space above me! Yippee!

When you publish it, it will look like this:

One time, I wrote a whole paragraph about how awesome I was. It was a short paragraph.

 

Oh look, when I publish this post, there’s going to be a bunch of extra space above me! Yippee!

Easy. And you can add in as many of these bad boys as you like.

By the way, if you Big Shots stuck around and are now thinking “But THAT’S not semantically correct!” then here’s your cookie.

squirrel-cookie
Image by Tomi Tapio

Oh crap. The squirrel got it. Well there you go.