Category: Rants

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.

Same old stuff

Same old stuff, same old gripes, same old everything. It’s been awhile since I’ve added something to this blog – I still can’t get the photos in the header to rotate (Ugh). I’ve been monitoring both the forums and some of the plug-in sites for the new MT4 and no news on all of the problems with it – which is why I’m now using WordPress. However, the problems with the WorkPress “theme” I’m using also haven’t been resolved. If things keep going they way they’ve been for the past few months, I can certainly see that MT will soon be history. I think that they REALLY blew it with version 4 and the lack of response to those problems is indicative of a platform in a lot of trouble. That’s a shame as MT had so much potential.

With regard to other matters, the world is still nuts – I’m not going to go into details now but let’s just say that evil seems to have temporarily prevailed. Whatever happened to honesty, integrity, “doing the right thing,” etcetera? The battles may have been lost but the wars are certainly not over.

I think that we’ve now live in a culture that has changed dramatically for the worst over the past forty years – self-centered, narcissistic socialism seems to be taking over and is having dire consequences for this country. What is right is no longer the standard by which things are measured- what is “good” for the masses (i.e., corporate America) is. One example (of many that I could have used) may be found in a rather unusual place – in reviews of Amazon.com’s latest high-tech item of conspicuous consumption – the “Kindle.” (What a dumb name.)  The “Kindle” is merely an extraordinarily overpriced device that displays electronic versions of books. While the concept is good, Amazon charges an outlandish $400 for the gadget! Then one needs to purchase “books,” subscriptions, and other materials to read on it. While reading electronic documents has some advantages – especially if it is used for pleasure reading – as one can change the font size, it’s allegedly more difficult to lose one’s place in a “book,” and there’s even a dictionary built in that may be used to look up words “on the fly” (yeah, that’s a cool feature), at four hundred dollars, the Kindle is simply an incredible waste of money.

In addition to the cost, the “Kindle” has a lot of other problems – it’s not only extremely ugly but many of the wonderful features of real books are lost. The invention of the printed book is, arguably, one of the greatest of all time. Books are efficient, may be marked up with notes, content may be effectively organized using real book markers or post-it notes, they don’t need batteries, stand up well to all sorts of physical abuse, and may be used for years. They may also be shared, do not require any type of connection to the Internet or wireless services, can be taken to the beach (imagine dropping an overpriced Kindle in the sand). Books may also be sold or traded, have no shelf-life, can be scanned quickly by flipping through pages, often contain content other than text (i.e., pictures, graphs, charts, etc.) , may be scanned and copied, and don’t require a user-manual to operate.

So, what does all of this have to do with the price of beans in Tokyo? Actually, plenty. Reading through the reviews of the Kindle on Amazon.com reveals a lot – in fact, it shows just how arrogant and petty our society has become. There are many reviews that rightly slam the Kindle as a grossly overpriced, poorly designed gadget. Interestingly, there is also another group that is diametrically opposed to any and all criticism. These clowns seem to be obsessed not only with the novelty of the Kindle (sure, it would have some uses – I wouldn’t mind having one if it cost twenty bucks) but they engage in all-out attacks on anyone who complains. Equally interesting is that the attacks are all one-sided – those who support the Kindle attack those against it and, almost never the other way around. Their “arguments” in favor of the Kindle are almost always the same; including:

  1. People have “no right” to review the Kindle if they don’t own it.
  2. “Opinions” are “reviews” and should be posted elsewhere
  3. We’re living in “the ‘twenty-first century’
  4. Technology = good, all else = bad

Of course, all of these whines are indicative of those who are really a bunch of morons. One doesn’t need to purchase anything in order to review it – using the same flawed logic, are only those people who personally own 747’s allowed to review it? Obviously not! We’ve also seen numerous cases in which the above flawed arguments have been used in the past. For example, I very clearly remember argument that CD roms were going to be the panacea for all of the world’s problems – especially in education. CD roms were going magically transfer knowledge to anyone that used them. That example, of course, was (and still is) absurd. A CD rom is merely a storage device that holds a lot of information. CD roms don’t “teach” anything, they don’t participate in the learning process, they don’t alter the manner in which new information is retained, etc. Again, CD roms are just a different way of storing content. 

The asinine argument about “living in the twentieth century” is also absurd – what does that calendar have to do the need for people to behave in a different manner? The answer to that, of course, is also obvious – the calendar has nothing to do with behavior. The acquisition of knowledge is not dependent upon the medium in which it is presented, it is determined, rather, by how we are “wired” physiologically. The passage of time, clearly, has nothing to do with how we are supposed to “learn.” In fact, a good argument might be that it is highly likely that humans learn today in the same manner as they did two thousand years ago – through trial and error, focused study, rote memorization, experience, etc., etc.

The most disturbing part; however, is how arrogant and idiotic these Kindle-loving morons really are – just because someone has the “audacity” to criticize a new gadget is enough to set off the ire of techno-socialists how think that the world needs to change because corporate America is selling a new toy. What a sad, sad state of affairs.