Wordpress and hand-coded html

I found a gotcha, am I missing any others?

[See_It_Now]

I started a Wordpress blog, with the WP software running on my site. I make the entries with hand-coded html because that is what I am used to. I use a lot of images, usually in non-Wordpress directories. I was using relative URLs, which worked fine in the blog, but then I found that the images did not show up in the RSS feeds. I had to change to absolute URLs.

So, are there any other similar gotchas I should be aware of when hand-coding my blog entries?

Or, looking at it from the other side, are there compelling advantages to doing it 'the Wordpress way' and putting the images into the WP database?

[jimbeetle]

To take full advantage of all the bells and whistles, yeah, it's best to work within WordPress itself. If you happen to want to use specific WP functions or you find a plugin that you want to use things are expected to be found in certain places, like the image upload directory.

[reprint]

Though i started out handcoding as well because it was what i was used to, it just makes sense if you are using a CMS, to get to know it and use its features. Unless you want to really delve beneath the surface and understand how it does everything so you can handcode in peace, you are better off using WordPress for what it does best: let you focus on your content rather than code.
If you cant help yourself, try hacking WP code itself to customise for yourself. You learn something new and avoid the itch to code HTML :)

[fside]

> avoid the itch to code HTML<

If I could generalize that to script, even css, you have to "hand-code", at least at some point. One can begin a new site by hand-coding. Then goes on the styles, then the behavior, the script. But unless it's a very simple site, I would imagine the coding is inescapable. Now, at some point, you wouldn't actually code the pages, but would code the templates used to generate those pages.

[ergophobe]

>>I found that the images did not show up in the RSS feeds.

This is not a Wordpress gotcha, but an RSS gotcha, which makes sense - what meaning would a relative URL have when it's in someone's RSS reader? How can software know whether your relative URL is relative to root or the current page? So you need absolute URLs in RSS.