Experimenting with Formatting in Steemit Posts

I guess I tend to be somewhat of a perfectionist, when it comes to presentation of text and writing. 

This post isn't as much about quality content as it is about exploring ways to format my Steemit posts for more visual appeal and better readability.

So we get to host our images offsite somewhere (I use imgsafe.org because it's fast and easy and no frills), and most of the time, the result is that we get an image all the way across the page. 

On some of the other writing venues I use there's more flexibility with the text and image editors-- I guess here I'll have to try to tweak the HTML a little to make images appear differently. For example, I want this photo of a nesting osprey (taken a few years back during a visit to Montana) to sit at the left of the page with text wrapping around it to the right. Makes for a more balanced appearance of the whole post. I have tried various approaches to doing this, but it seems like the Steemit text editor strips the HTML tags somewhere in the process...

I can get it to work as long as I write the post in pure HTML and never open the editor. Well, at least it shows in the preview area... but I have to wonder if it will still be there after I click "post." I hope it does. Writing posts "in HTML" is a bit cumbersome, but I've been doing this long enough that I'll put up with it to get the look I want.

This little experiment made me pause and ponder the whole issue of making online articles and posts aesthetically pleasing, as well as informative.

OK, so now I'm gonna try to stick a picture of aspen trees in Colorado over on the right, instead.

Anyway, getting back to the point, I end up wondering if people even care whether or not posts "look nice." These days it seems like we have so little time on our hands and so much information coming through our life that paying attention to appearance is almost a luxury. Maybe I'm old-- or getting old-- because I do care. I cared even 15 years ago when people would build those absolutely horrible and annoying GeoCities web sites... anyone remember those? They were-- at least to my sense of aesthetics-- the absolute pinnacle of bad web design.

Well, I think I am coming to the end of this experimental post. If all works as I am hoping, we'll have text flowing around one image to the right, and another image to the left, with captions below each image.

Not going to post instructions for how to do this quite yet... at least not until I see whether the actual post comes through in the same format as I see the "preview" below.