Where have we been for the past few days? Well like I said in our previous bit of site news we had some style things that had to be worked out. In doing so I managed to find that a piece of our site has stopped functioning and was making the site basically broken in every single browser except Firefox (or at least the most recent version for windows). You see because that’s how I typically view the site myself, I had no idea exactly when the site broke or how and it was broken in quite a weird manner. Here’s what happened and how I fixed it. Also the other changes I made.

I did have an idea that it had to do with the LinkWithin widget that I’d recently installed but couldn’t say for certain. I was having a weird styling problem that I was trying to fix with it and that’s why I suspected it, cause like an idiot I was playing with it a little, but only with some CSS. Anyway when I disabled it the problem magically went away. But I wanted the LinkWithin widget on my site. It’s by far the best and most attractive related posts option I’ve come across and during these past few days I think I’ve tried them all. For me it was the one that I really wanted. I e-mailed their support but never heard back. This was stressing me way the hell out.

I spent the past few days like I said trying out alternatives and constantly checking my inbox for something from the LinkWithin people. I could however still write articles, there’s a brand new one that I’m proud of going up tomorrow, and view the site in FireFox, so I decided while I was messing around with the code anyway to make some other changes.

I got rid of the Sociable buttons at the bottom of every post and replaced them with ShareThis. Not for any real reason other than I liked the simplicity of the ShareThis button, as well as it’s growing adoption among many big webpages. So now you can use that to share posts all over the place, and I highly encourage you do. I also added TweetMeme, which is that little button you see next to ShareThis. It just allows for you to instantly tweet a post you read here, and keeps a count of how many times a post is tweeted about. It’s a cool little gadget and I’ve seen that too being adopted all over the place. You’ll also notice shadowbox galleries. Clicking any image on the site (in newer posts) will open up a shadowbox gallery with the image and all the others in that post displayed at their full size, without you ever leaving the page.

Anyway back to the LinkWithin problem. The actual details of the problem were that it was causing the sidebar to display on the bottom of the page and completely unformatted, and it also cut off everything below the main content, including the LinkWithin box itself, comments, etc. I figured if I was having this problem that others might have experienced it as well. A google search produced not one single real problem anyone has had with LinkWithin. All recommendations of their service. And any time anyone mentioned a problem they said the LinkWithin support had been some of the best they’d seen and they fixed it right up. So to LinkWithin’s credit I’ll write off their non-response as them either being overloaded or just a simple one off bad experience with a normally good support team.

In any case most of the things I encountered that talked about sidebars not appearing properly (no mention of LinkWithin in these pages, just me fishing) said it was probably a non-closed div tag. I literally spent hours staring at the LinkWithin code and looking for it opening a div that it didn’t close and within every single line of my code. I had none. Although my site could use a some touch ups according to W3C Validation, overall the coding is not bad.

Tonight I sat down and with literally my final action before I gave up and disabled LinkWithin for good I did one last thing. I deleted it from my server and went back and got a new widget from them, same settings and all, uploaded and activated it and suddenly it magically worked. Everything was back to normal. Even the little style thing I’d been trying to get rid of in the first place. But I’d learned how to fix that. I had to remove a line from the LinkWithin plugin code. I’ll note here this isn’t a problem with them either, but an oddity of CSS that no jiggering could fix so removing the line was the only fix. As soon as I did that and re-loaded the page in other browsers the problem was back. But I know just enough about coding to know this line was unimportant and wouldn’t cause this. So I did the one other thing I hadn’t tried. I opened the original .zip LinkWithin had given me, deleted the line there, re-zipped it, and uploaded and activated that file. Suddenly now everything works. The culprit? Ultimately it was that the entire time I was editing the plugin I was doing so through WordPress’ built in code editor. It seems like that was adding a space or something to the file thus breaking it. So if you ever come across an issue that’s similar just do your editing locally then upload it to WP.

So now everything is fine and we’ll be back to your regularly schedule content.