One thing you probably didn’t know about Wordpress

As much as we all like to think that we know everything there is to know about Wordpress, we do run into little surprises every now and then. Well, this last one I ran into doesn’t cease to surprise me - more because I don’t think anyone else has encountered it before!

Simply put, suppose you are reading a blog post and want to make a personal comment (or a heads up that you don’t want others to know about) to the blog author, you can enclose them within “<” and “>” while commenting and it can only be seen by the blog author himself!

So if you were to tell me that this was a good finding, it would look like

<That’s a good finding! Wonder why I didn’t think of it!>

I’ve been using this technique on a few blogs that I’ve left comments over in the last couple of days - so I’m sure this works on a variety of versions!

I went about to check if the same was applicable to posts as well. For this, I switched to the “Code” editor while writing the post and added

<test>

I published the post and I saw what I expected to see - nothing! Upon editing the post, I noticed Wordpress had “closed” the tag with “</test>”. This suprisingly, doesn’t happen with the comments! My hunch is that Wordpress takes it for granted that any text enclosed between “<” and “>” are HTML tags and attempts to process it as HTML. As to why the same doesn’t happen with comments is beyond me - if you do, I’d love to hear them in the comments. err, just make sure you leave it so the public can read it too.