This has been a productive week for me as I try to squeeze every not-at-work hour I have, to fulfill assignments on both my LIBR 246 and LIBR 248 classes. I was able to submit the social bookmarking assignment for LIBR 246 and my “create your own name authority record” online exercise and practice exercise # 2, ahead of the deadlines and feeling a little proud of myself a bit. Although, I really have to catch up on sleep as I have been pulling all-nighters for the last two weeks, and that is not good health-wise. But even in my sleep-deprived and coffee-infused state I was finally able to have a light bulb moment, that feeling when a solution to a problem that was bugging me to no end for several weeks suddenly presented itself.
The problem was Internet Explorer does not like my blog. It was not displaying any of the earlier blog posts I made. I tried everything, from reinstalling WordPress on the SJSU Senna server, to posting at discussion boards, picking the brains of co-workers and friends, and performing Google searches to try to find a solution. The advices I was getting from the Web from people having the same problems was beyond the state of my capabilities so I restrained myself form executing them as I don’t want to exacerbate the problem. The problem is not actually a big thing since my browser of choice is Firefox, but I still want my blog to display correctly on IE. Before having my light bulb moment, I have, through the process of elimination, concluded that it is not the WordPress theme, since I have tried even the most basic theme and it still won’t display correctly; and that I am the only one having that problem with IE since I looked at my LIBR 246 classmates’ blogs on IE and everything looks ok.
This issue was like a slow buzz that has been going on at the back of my mind. I can ignore it for awhile, but I always seem to go back to it and try some odd combination of removing widgets and plugins in the hope of pinpointing the root of it all. I do know that I won’t go to the extreme of deleting posts or reinstalling again, or even attempt coding, so that leaves me in a state of limbo.
So what was the light bulb moment? It came after I decided to change my theme from Whiteplus to Atahualpa and was busy redesigning the headers and adding cartoon blogs on some of the posts. I decided to add Dave Walker’s free-to-use cartoons on one of my earlier posts that was not displaying correctly on IE, when I noticed that there was a paragraph-long of unintelligible codes right at the bottom of the post while viewing it through the edit page. I checked my new posts and none of those posts have it. I looked at these mysterious codes closely and I realized that they look like formatting codes. And that was it! I checked another old post that IE was not displaying and it also have these codes. So I went ahead and edited it out of the post and when I checked it on both Firefox and IE, everything looked normal and displayed correctly. I usually type my post on a Word and paste it on the blog when I am done. So my theory is that these codes are Word formatting codes that WordPress removes when you paste text from Word into the blog, but somehow did not get removed and caused havoc with how IE was interpreting that part of the page. It is funny and weird that Firefox did not seem to mind all these errant codes coming from Word formatting and ironic that Internet Explorer which is a Microsoft product just like Word won’t play nice with it. But then again that is why I use Firefox.
Cartoon by Dave Walker. Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog at We Blog Cartoons.