HTML Editor with ActiveRain Friendly Tags

Have you ever tried to get something to work but just kept running into roadblocks?

This morning Katerina Gasset had a feature post about a neat online tool that helps them format their posts with colors and different fonts. All I really wanted to do is find an HTML editor that would highlight text in yellow. I thought this would be the answer and was really excited about it. I had tried the Nvu editor that Katerina had written about last year and never got it to work for me. At the time it wasn't that important to me to really figure out what I was doing wrong.

But today I was determined to get something to work, one way or another. I saw from the comments that I wasn't the only one having problems. After a lot of trial and error and experimenting and searching, I finally came up with something that works.

Apparently ActiveRain made some changes last year and certain HTML codes no longer work. <font> tags no longer work in the ActiveRain editor. Instead, you need to have <span> tags. For some reason, Box.net was creating code with the <font> tags most of the time. Once in a while it would create code with the <span> tags. I never could figure out how to force it to do the code that worked in ActiveRain.

Before throwing in the towel and settling for continuing doing black and white posts, I did a Google search for "free online HTML editor" and starting looking for one that would create the code that would work in ActiveRain.

The third site I checked out seems to be the ticket.
http://www.online-html-editor.de/index_en.php

I found one that finally works for me.

It does background color highlighting.

It does color text.

There are different text sizes to choose from.

There are many neat fonts to choose from.

It doesn't seem to have spell check though. But it seems like you can save the HTML code in ActiveRain, then toggle over to the WYSIWYG editor in order to use the ActiveRain spell check and it won't mess up the formatting. But once you go into the WYSIWYG editor, don't go back the the HTML editor. It seems to mess a few things up.

The best thing is that it produced the code that seems to finally work for me in ActiveRain.

I'm so happy that I stuck with it and finally got something to work. I hope I save a few people a lot of time and frustration. I can feel your pain.