How do you teach HTML to a blogger?

There is a really interesting blog called “Strange Maps” that I syndicate on my RSS aggregator page. Unfortunately, while the content of the page is intelligent and interesting, the author evidently knows fuck all about the web. Recently, all his entries have been formatted using <h1> tags, then with <span style=…> tags to set the fonts back to something more reasonable. Since my aggregator strips formatting tags like <span> so it can impose its own format, this leads to some ugly results on my page. Another time, he made his entire post in red. When I try to explain what he’s doing wrong, he doesn’t seem to understand. I suspect he must be composing his posts in Word or something worse (if there is anything worse than Word) and pasting them into WordPress.

How can I get through to him to stop doing this?

It wasn’t me after all

As I suspected, it turns out my two 30-45 minute periods of being unable to reach my colo box weren’t my fault. It’s even possible some of the stutters I was having this weekend weren’t my fault. I just got an email from the company I rent my rack space from saying that Time Warner, the people who own the datacenter the rack is in, needs to make an “emergency software update” to fix their recent connectivity issues.

I may be off the air for some time overnight. They claim “up to 45 minutes of loss of network connectivity”, but I’ve done enough upgrades to know that means it will either take 45 seconds, or 5 hours.