The case of the missing right sidebar

While my schedule has kept me completely busy with other things, I haven’t had much of a chance to post here. Part of the reason is that the back end (the inner-workings) of this blog have had quite a few problems. It’s been quite sometime that I made the switch from Movable Type to WordPress (these programs that this blog relies upon to operate) and have never regretted it. Just the same, that transition has also been a nightmare. First I had to find a theme that I liked – then, WP went through several updates that broke some of the code on the now defunct theme. That, in turn, led me to try another theme (the one I’m running now) and, of course, WP went through yet another update. Heck, everything seemed to stop working! Well, not quite – things stopped working only when using Internet Explorer, but no problems were evident when using Google Chrome or Firefox. Maybe WP didn’t like IE.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone in and started tweaking and repairing the messes left behind by all of the upgrades. As to be expected, that too caused additional problems. (Geez, will it ever end?) I even found problems left over from when this blog used MT and didn’t surface until some of the latest updates were done with both WP and the theme. That problem was an especially obnoxious one – some pages had stopped displaying properly (for example, the right sidebar didn’t show up on some pages) a very long time ago and, despite repeated efforts, I simply couldn’t find the cause. I tried changing themes: that didn’t work. I disabled widgets: that didn’t work. I even exported all of the content to and placed it on another site (as a test): that didn’t work!

The interesting thing, however, is that when I recreated this blog on another site and the problem still existed, other test blogs on the same site, did work. Okay, so now I was really confused – could it be the content of each blog that was the problem? (Yeah, I know, I write some pretty heated stuff –  maybe my topics were just too hot! LOL!) If there was something wrong with the content, then if I deleted ALL of the posts (on test blog, that is), then the right sidebar should reappear on the home page (as well as on a few other pages). Well. . .that was it! After deleting all posts, the right side bar worked beautifully!

Now that I had isolated the problem a bit further, I had to find out the specific post or posts that was/were offending WordPress (BTW, I don’t care if the content of my posts offends anyone or anything), I’m referring to the CODE behind them. In order to do that, I had to recreate the blog yet again on the test site and this time, I started removing several posts at a time (I did this in reverse chronological order under the assumption that the older posts had originally displayed properly and were not to blame). Interestingly, that was not the case: I’ve already made well over 100 posts on this blog and it took a bit of time to delete a few posts, test the blog, and then remove some more. I had already removed a large number of them when suddenly, the right bar started to work again. Aha! I had found something! I noted which posts were remaining and recreated the blog yet again. This time, I looked at the last set of posts I had removed: at first glance, I could find nothing wrong with them except one seemed to have had some content missing – that was strange – sure, I make stupid mistakes when I write (who doesn’t?) but most of the post seemed to be missing. Odd, very odd!

To isolate the problem further, I went to the edit screen (dashboard) – the location where I actually write my posts, as well as deal with all of the administrative components of this blog – and looked at the cranky post. It was there that I noticed something unusual that did not show up on the blog itself (the part that is viewable by everyone) – the title of the post contained additional characters and that these characters were HTML code (which should not normally show up here as I was looking at the code using the default “visual edit” screen where everything should display normally. This was the finally clue that led to the solution!  Given that HTML was showing up in places where it shouldn’t I switched to HTML view in the post editor and guess what?! I found a LOT of extra HTML garbage that shouldn’t have been there and that garbage was the extra crap HTML that many Microsoft programs generate – something that millions of people have complained about for years – most Microsoft programs such as Word and other Office programs output so much extra HTML that many other HTML programs contain commands to remove this junk. Unfortunately cutting and pasting materials from other web sites and from Microsoft programs leaves their junk code, even though it is not visible except when using an HTML editor.

Assuming that the junk HTML was the cause of the problem, I then removed all of same posts as I had done during the previous test except for the one that I knew contained it. This time, I suspected that the side bar still would not display properly and, sure enough,  I was right. The next step was to go into the HTML editor for the problem post and manually remove Microsoft’s junk. Guess what? (You get one guess.) After removing the extra needless and worthless code, the right sidebar now displayed properly and the blog worked again! Even more disgusting though is that I had mentioned earlier that there were no problems viewing the blog, even with the bad code, with Firefox or Chrome, the problem only appeared when viewing it with Microsoft’s IE. That’s right, Microsoft’s own junk code is what caused IE to not display the blog properly. Geez! What a huge waste of time it took for me to uncover this problem only to find that Micro$oft was to blame.

How did this happen? There appear to be several reasons: there were other posts that also had the same code – all of those appear to have been written when this blog still used MT. These same posts were originally displayed in older browsers (and I use the updated versions of all of them) – the latest version of IE has compatiblity problems with many web sites (it doesn’t like some of M$ own junk HTML code). Also, WordPress has gone through several major updates (wish they would add a feature to clean up offending M$ HTML). It appears as if I had used cut and paste to copy a press release I was commenting on in the post were I uncovered the solution. Interestingly, the other posts that contained the junk code did not break the right sidebar – I will often us M$ Word to write something and will then use cut and paste to add it to my posts – I manually removed the problem code from those posts too.

Now that this blog is finally working again (it’s been broken for a very long time), maybe I’ll write a bit more.

It’s taken a long time

As I recently mentioned, I finally made the switch from Movable Type 4 to WordPress, as the software behind this blog, and I’m very glad I did. After spending quite a bit of time trying to figure out how to iron out a few bugs from the new template that I’m using (Cutline), I finally got things to work – tags are now showing up properly (due to a bug in Cutline), random images are now appearing (again, there seems to have been some type of bug in the program which required quite a bit of tweaking to get them to work), and I finally just figured out how to create “widgets.’ Widgets are very small clips of code that allow all of the cool things on the sides of this blog to work – things like the search box, calendar, links to various places, and even the local weather conditions. To be honest, it took far more time to figure out how to create widgets than was necessary as the documentation for WordPress on that matter was about as clear as mud. When it finally dawned on me how to create them, they were actually extremely easy (and quick) to create.Again, as all of the various discussions on the matter (not only on the WordPress site but also on other sites that offer snippets of code that could be used) were very confusing, I thought I’d post the instructions here for my own future reference; here goes:

  1. Open up the WordPress control panel/dashboard (sorry, but only I can open mine)
  2. Click on the “Presentation” tab
  3. Open up the “Widgets” tab that should now appear.
  4. Scroll down the page and click on that dropdown box under “textbox widgets” and select the next number that appears (for example, “1” is set as the default so select “2”). That will create a new box under “Available Widgets.”
  5. Click and drag that new box to the appropriate sidebar.
  6. Double click on that box and a new window will show up.
  7. Enter the widget’s heading in the top box on the new window.
  8. Enter the code into the bottom box on the same window.
  9. Click on “Save changes” which appears on the right side of the screen.
  10. You’re done!

Why there aren’t simple instructions on how to do this in WordPress’ documentation or elsewhere is beyond me. It only takes a matter of a minute or so to create a widget. The only other question that others might have is figuring out where the code for the widgets come from. Of course, it is quite simple to create your own but there are also many sources available on the net: I was able to easily find code to use for the weather, random pictures that I’ve posted on Flickr account, and even books from my personal library that have been cataloged using LibraryThing.com. Interestingly, WordPress and others claim that Javascript (a programming language that’s used on many/most web sites to create simple things) won’t work on WordPress but I’ve found that’s not true. Some of the widgets on this site use Javascript and seem to be working just fine. For example, if your books are cataloged by LibraryThing.com (a free service for bookoholics to keep track of their library), all that needs to be done is to go to their site, find their code for used in widgets, and then cut and paste it as noted in my instructions above. Can’t get any easier than that.

Finally, I’ve now added photos that I wanted to use in my headers for this and my KAP (kite aerial photography) blog so now I can finally get back to blogging instead of dealing with all of the behind the scenes nonsense. I’ve used photos of places I’ve been that I would love to go back to – the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert/Pertrified Forest, on a harbor cruise looking out at Catalina Island, and Tent Rocks National Monument located southwest of Santa Fe in New Mexico. Of course, now that I’ve figured out how to change the random header code to display more photos (found in the header.php file), I’ll add more in the future.

The only thing remaining is that I still cannot find is a good plug-in (another snippet of code that can be used for all kinds of things) in order to post my book reviews, with links to my Amazon account, on my book review blog. About the only thing that still works is a plug-in that works (and not very well) with MT.  Hopefully, someone will come up with something for that in the near future.

At last, I’ve finally moved over to WordPress

It’s taken several months to convert my blogs over to WordPress from MovableType – as noted previously, MT’s latest version (4) gave me so many headaches that I finally dumped it. It was extremely user un-friendly and was nearly impossible to customize in the manner that I wanted to. While the actual conversion process to WordPress wasn’t difficult, I had a LOT of problems with the “theme” (Cutline) that I’m now using. Overall, I really like the new layout but try as I might, I could not get the pictures at the top of each page to rotate (for the most part, every time you click on the refresh button, a new image should appear). I decided to make one last ditch effort to determine what the problem was and, as luck would have it, I was able to get it to work! It appears as if the problem had to do with the order in which WordPress and Cutline are installed: from what I can determine, it appears as if importing the data from MT into WordPress must be saved for the very end of the process. Regardless, it now works and I’m happy with it.

The photos at the top of this blog now rotate randomly each time the page is visited/refreshed. Even better is that I was able to locate photos that I’ve taken and used them for the ones that appear. All in all, it’s been a fairly trying experience but, in the end, everything is now working properly. I’ve still got one of my blogs on MT but that’s only because I haven’t been able to locate a plugin to make it perform in that manner I wish it to.

Goodbye (or good riddance) Movable Type

Okay, I give up – I’ve had it with Movable Type 4. I recently “upgraded” to the latest “new and improved” version of Movable Type and it’s given me nothing but headaches – it’s not possible to export templates without buying an expensive plug-in, trying to customize it is a nightmare, for every step forward there have been three or four back (it seems as if every time there’s an “upgrade,” MT loses functionality). On top of that, I bought an individual license at the beginning of the year because I finally gave up on some of the problems (with the older version) I was having and now MT no longer recognizes that license for this latest version.

While some things look “great” (like the administrative control panel), beauty with Movable Type 4 is only skin deep – there seem to be many little problems and quirks which often interfere with simple things like publishing an entry. Frankly, I’d rather spend my time blogging and not spend countless hours just trying to get my blogs to work, at the same level as with older versions of MT.

So. . .I’ve finally decided to dump MT and move on the WordPress. Interestingly, it was far easier to install WordPress (minutes versus hours), they have a ton of templates, their support forums are far more active that MT’s, they actually have a LOT of plug-ins (which don’t cost an arm and a leg), and everything seems to work as it should. As a result, this will be my last post on this blog (I’ll eventually put a redirect on this page to my WordPress blog, which already contains the same content). Of course, I intend to cross post this entry on the new blog. Based upon my experience so far, I’ll be able to get the new version customized within a very short period of time – hopefully, within a matter of days. With luck, I’ll soon be concerned only with blogging and not dealing with all of the backend problems with MovableType.

Just too much going on. . .

Well, it’s been an extremely crazy month with no end in sight (at least for the near future). Too much going on although I can’t discuss much of it here. Obviously, I’ve got MovableType 4.01 up and running. I’m still not happy with the difficulties that it presents – the new template system is a nightmare and, while I can change some things, I really can’t customize it the way I want because of its complexity. Just the same, at least it works so all of my data (i.e., past posts) are still available.

On a different note, I took my boy to a movie last night – “Dragon Wars.” I’ve got to admit that it was, quite literally, one of the worst movies I’ve seen in a very long time (I laughed throughout most of it – especially during the scenes that weren’t supposed to be funny)! As far as I’m concerned, it was merely a 2007 remake of Godzilla. I suppose that the only redeeming value of the movie is that Los Angeles was obliterated! Too funny!