Doodlebee

which is Outlook, and direct from websites (we link to other sites’ articles)

That’ll do it.

If your boss isn’t sending you plain text emails, then you’re copying/pasting text that’s been formatted by Microsoft – just like it does for Word.

Also, if you copy/paste from other websites (like directly from the screen) chances are that text is also formatted.

Your best option is to take the information, copy and paste it into a plain text editor, and then copy/paste *that* into WordPress.

Do you have it within your Loop?

I think more information is needed – there’s not much to go on here. pretty much all you say is “this doesn’t work,” but it’s not clear as to why – especially since the code is pretty much plucked from codex. Can you not provide the *exact* code you have in your template file for this section (don’t post the whole file here – if you must, use pastebin please)? Tell us if it’s in the Loop or in the functions.php file?

With Flickr, you get a larger community and more exposure. You also don’t have to use your own server resources to host your images – more free space is left open to you on your own space.

But also with Flickr, you have to abide by their terms, and if flickr goes down, then your images go down until they come back up.

If you want lots of traffic, use flickr. If you don’t care, and want more control over your images, and you can afford the space, use your own hosting space. it’s really just a matter of what you want to do with them, and how much control you want to have over them.

use <!–nextpage–> where you want the Page to paginate. And be sure to use the right tags in your theme files to display the pagination links.

You might want to read this.

I suppose you could check to see if comments are associated with the post, but that would require a custom function. You’d probably have to query the database first because there’s no existing parameter for checking if there’s comments or not (not that I’m aware of anyway) and use that to add to your query. I don’t know of any plugins that do this, but a forum search comes up with a bunch of stuff. Maybe one of those can help you?

1) show ten most recent excerpts, random order

<?php
query_posts('showposts=10&order=RAND');
if(have_posts()): while(have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

2) show 25 most recent posts

<?php
query_posts('showposts=25');
if(have_posts()): while(have_posts()): the_post(); ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

more info on queries here.

You might try asking this over at the WordPress MU Forums.

That depends. if you changed settings (that are in the database – such as what’s in your widgets, or your site name) then they’ll be retained. If you changed the code within the theme files, then no, they won’t be.