On my old blog, I wrote all my posts entirely in HTML. If you have never tried coding in HTML you may think it is quite difficult but, though it may seem daunting at first, it’s quite easy to learn enough for the purposes of writing blog posts. Moreover, since the code you use is repetitive, you can write the most often-used snippets into a file and copy/paste them into your blog editor as needed. This not only speeds up the process but avoids a lot of errors.

When including an image, I would centre it on the page and centre its caption underneath it. This was so obvious and so straightforward to do that I hardly ever gave it a second thought.

When I started this blog, however, all that changed. Though writing HTML isn’t difficult, it takes longer and requires more care than writing simple text. As explained in About the blog, the idea is to write posts as I go (“on the hoof”, as I express it). For example, as we go about, I will take photos and then, when we stop for coffee, I will write some text and edit and insert some photos. Then we will go on with our ramble and the scenario will be repeated until I think I have reached the end of that post and I will send it off to WordPress.

When you insert an image in the WordPress app on the iPhone, you can do only a limited amount of formatting. You can, for example, align the image left, right or centre and you can add a caption. And this – adding captions – is where the unhappiness starts.

WordPress (or at least, the “theme”, that is the layout that I am using, called Twenty-Eleven) does not allow me to position the caption. It places it beneath the image, on the left, preceded by a double dash. There is nothing I can do to change this. Well, there is, of course: I could switch the editor to HTML and replace WordPress’s HTML code with my own.

Why not do that, then? Well, because it would make blogging more complicated and time-consuming which is not what you want when you are blogging on the go (or “hoof) and time is in short supply.

I could, I suppose, post-edit my text at home, but that is precisely what I wanted to avoid and it would be inconsistent with the intentional spontaneous character of the blog.

In future, then, I will either not add a caption to my images, instead describing them in the text that follows, or write a caption by itself on the line following the image and putting it in italics. Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t allow you to centre text (or right-align it), so such captions will sit on the left some distance below the image.

This is not satisfactory but it will have to do and I wanted to explain it so that you can bear it in mind as you read the blog.