Today is a test...
Symbol of Justice as Woman with Sword and Book
(Borrowed from Wikipedia)
... and therefore boring.
Persistant readers will have noticed problems with my sidebar. These problems are recurrent. For some reason that I do not understand (due to my abysmal ignorance of things technical), my sidebar has always been unstable. About once a month or so, it loses or garbles code and thereby wreaks havoc with my links.
Yesterday, everything disappeared.
I salvaged what I could by setting up an auxiliary blog, Gypsy Scholarship Backup, where I hope to keep a copy of my sidebar as a backup in case I lose things again.
You're wondering, But won't that also be unstable?
Good question. I hope not. I think that the instability is connected to my time spent online posting entries, especially if an entry takes time due to setting up links and pictures. Yesterday, I was trying to include the above photo of Justice from Wikipedia, but it wouldn't paste onto my blog entry. I tried several times, unsuccessfully, then I lost my entire sidebar.
Today, as you see, the photo posted (though it doesn't make much sense in the context of today's entry).
Anyway, if any experts out there can tell me why my sidebar is so unstable and how I might make it more stable, I would be grateful.
posted by Horace Jeffery Hodges @ 5:22 AM
9 comments
9 Comments:
If you ever post anything bigger than the main posting part can accomodate, it will make the sidebar go bye-bye. Also, there are times it disappears and republishing your entire blog seems to take care of it. My 2 cents worth...
In the first case that you mention, the sidebar usually ends up at the bottom of the blog. I've had that happen, too.
As for the complete disappearance, that only happened yesterday, but the cause was the same as when only a portion has disappeared: missing code. In such cases as this, republishing wouldn't help (unless Blogger has a backup somewhere that I'm unaware of).
Something is occasionally 'eating' the codes on my sidebar. I know from looking and finding the results. If I go to my "Dashboard" (reached by clicking "Blogger"), then click on my "Blog Name," I come to a page where I can click "Template." That's where I find the codes that format my blog. Occasionally, some codes go missing.
Depending on what has gotten 'eaten,' various things can vanish on my blog. Yesterday, a portion of code that governs my entire blogroll had been 'eaten,' which caused my blogroll to vanish.
Fortunately, I was able to reconstruct the codes by borrowing from my new-opened backup blog and from a cached page of my blog from several days age that I found by Googling.
Jeffery Hodges
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It's blogger, from what I'm aware of. I had problems with blogger as well. You ought to switch to Wordpress.
Chris, were you able to move your old blog entries over to Wordpress?
Jeffery Hodges
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Hope your problems with your posts are sorted. Something seems to be in the air! Everything my end became temporarly unavailable yesterday. Perhaps, if you teach Lycidas, this post on my blog might interest you. Don't know. The Hermetical Poetics of Lycidas. Number was significant in ...
I think that Saurkraut is on the money, there, although you're right that that usually merely pushes the post to the bottom. If you're linking to pictures, it is possible that you're linking to a site that has a lot of traffic on little bandwidth, which might mean that when the page loads, it has to take a long time getting the information from wherever is hosting that picture. If that is the case, the sidebar may not load. That's just my guess, though.
Wordpress is not without its problems, and requires even more technical know-how than Blogger does, as there is not only XHTML involved, but a whole lot of PHP code, too. I think there are pros and cons to both platforms. If blogger will ever chose to implement categories (rather than merely using a laborous hack to del.icio.us's stuff), I would consider moving back, not least because, I think, all my stuff will disappear if/when I terminate my domain name. There are free Wordpress blogs available, though.
All that's not necessarily accurate--just my best guess.
Eshuneutics, I read your blog entry but couldn't easily get into the esoteric numerology. I'm also not very learned with respect to Lycidas. These are my intellectual limitations. I don't doubt that you're right about Milton's use of numerology (and you'll note a reference to 666 in my recent post concerning another hellish excursion), but I don't yet understand Milton's numerology very well.
Jeffery Hodges
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Nathan, the problem is not just that the sidebar doesn't load. What happens is that some actual code that regulates the sidebar gets lost. That's a rather serious problem, and I don't understand why it happens.
Jeffery Hodges
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Yes, sometimes code does get eaten. One time, for no apparent reason, it happened to me, too. I had inserted some HTML code from Statcounter on my webpage a few days before. Everything was fine. Suddenly, some of the code in the vicinity of the Statcounter code got eaten. I have no idea why this happened, but because the only modification I had made to my template was the insertion of the Statcounter code, I assume that that must have been the problem. How does code get eaten? I guess I'll never know.
Well, good luck!
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