I dislike the WordPress Reader for one reason: the way it strips our posts of any of the design features we chose when we made our sites.

Photos that we may have inserted as a thumbnail next to a sentence or in a bulleted list shows up full size in the text as just another image. What’s the point of choosing a size and placement if our readers aren’t going to see it that way? How might it affect their perception of the post?

Sometimes, I indent my ingredients under one direction (as in add 1/2 cup of each of the following), but I recently discovered that those indented lines just show up justified to the left like any line in the text. I can’t go back and fix all my recipes that date back to 2014, but I’m going to try to keep in mind not to use indented lines, but to use bullets instead. For example, I did go in and change the recipe for my recent Banana Bread recipe to have bulleted lists where it makes sense (and I took out the thumbnail that shows up too big).

Probably, I’ll discover new ways that my posts don’t look as intended to my readers. Yes, it only affects readers who use the app, but I think that adds up to a lot of people. Sometimes, I visit your sites to see what I’m missing about your design choices, and it does tell me things about you that I would have missed in the Reader.

The Reader is absolutely convenient for a quick look at your newest posts, but for me, I feel that I’m losing something. I don’t see how the Reader, which is a feed of sorts, could reproduce our posts as they look on each of our sites, but it doesn’t hurt for us all to be aware of what we’re missing.