Culls Added Captions but Otherwise Works Well

I’m happy that these plugins exist, the Smash Balloon Custom Facebook Feed and the Smash Balloon Instagram Feed. You could say I’m ecstatic, even. I mean, since WordPress decided that they wouldn’t do the required work that Facebook added to the ability to link directly and interactively to Facebook and Instagram articles, someone was going to have to do the work for them and I certainly wasn’t going to be able to do the work myself. I would just go back to screenshotting the articles I wanted to discuss on the blog and then add captions back to them for anyone interested enough in the source to go look at the original article.

Captions are the problem with these plugins, though. I can add captions to them when I’m editing and they will show up in the article. But if I go back in and re-edit (as any writer does and should do) the captions are strippped off of the embed and I have to recreate them again. This is more than a little maddening since historically I have left off linking information and so lost access to source material when that material went offline later. With captions I can at least go look on archive.org or the google archive for historical information about missing articles. When the plugin then strips the data that I’ve taken the time to put into my captions specifically because I don’t want to lose the original linking information, it is basically breaking the thing that I take extra time and effort to do. In the meantime I will pull captions off of the embeds and put them under the linked article in a separate paragraph (like I used to have to do on blogger) but it seems like a cludgy way to get around a plugin behavior that I never encountered when WordPress was doing this work for me. If someone could fix that issue, that would be great.