This site makes use of several shortcodes to help style your pages. WordPress, by default, removes any extra spaces other than one blank line space in between paragraphs.
If you want do add additional blank lines, use shortcode with the word “blankline” in between two straight brackets… those are the lowercase brackets that are next to the p on your keyboard. This shortcode will insert one blank line that is “cleared” on both sides so that no text will appear to the left or right of it. Let’s insert 1 blank line here:
As you can see there’s a little more space above than in the previous paragraph, due to the shortcode. There’s another shortcode called (blankblock) which adds about 60px of blank space, equivalent to about 4 or 5 blank lines, helping you to easily put a larger spacing between sections. Let’s add one of those by putting the word “blankblock” in between those shortcode brackets:
See, the space above was added using one shortcode for blankblock. The third option is to add a visible line divider between sections, using a shortcode called (divider). See the line below this section… that is that shortcode in action.
Another shortcode is to format email addresses. There’s a long way to do this in HTML, but this shortcode is easier, and also formats the email addresses in a way that is more secure, because it prevents them from being harvested by spam robots that are looking to add you to email lists without your consent.
The shortcode is used by putting an opening tag (mailto) followed by the email address, and a closing tag (/mailto) and remember to include the slash, and use lowercase brackets instead of the parenthesis I’m using here. Here’s how it comes out in practice, making a clickable email link, which will open the default email program the user has set on their computer:
jim@boomient.com
Now you know a little about shortcodes!
