Calling all geeks! Calling all geeks!
Posted on | June 9, 2010 | 5 Comments
Come in geeks. I’m in need of geekly assistance for I am suffering my own geek-fail. Mayday! Mayday!
Why do you say ‘Mayday?’ It’s only a bank holiday. Why not ‘Shrove Tuesday’ or ‘Ascension Sunday?’ Ascension Sunday! Ascension Sunday! The fifteenth Wednesday after Pentecost. [That’s how to get geeks on-side – quote Red Dwarf.]
My site is doing something a little odd. While I’m somewhat au fait with the basic tweakage of the stuff that makes my ones and zeros appear as beautiful works of aesthetic wonder that travel down your internet pipes and splatter onto the back of your screens, the deeper intricacies of the dark CSS and PHP arts are hidden from me.
If, therefore, you have any idea why some single pages of this site seem to render what should be a sidebar as a bottom-bar, I’d appreciate your advice. For reasons unknown, some pages shove the sidebar right down the bottom, under the comments. This doesn’t seem to be related to the post length or number of comments. Nor does it seem related to whether comments are closed or not. I haven’t been able to figure out a common factor. Which sucks, really.
This one, this one and this one, for instance, are doing it while this one, this one and this one aren’t.
What’s going on?
The site runs on WordPress. It’s version 2.9 as I haven’t gotten around to going to 2.9.2 yet but, let’s face it, it’s relatively unlikely that’s causing the issue. A few plugins installed – nothing too odd, I should think – and all at current versions. If anyone is so bored they want to help and would like a list of plugins or any source files, feel free to shout.
UPDATE: All better now. The luminescent brilliance of Golden Boy has, er, brilliantly located the problem and it should now be rectified. Brilliant. As you were, geeks. You can go back to installing Linux on everything and porting Doom to run on your mum’s teapot. Thanks.
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Gerry Hayes
I mostly sit around all day and drink tea. Occasionally, I write stuff and send it to strangers so they can humiliate me and deride my efforts. Other than the self-harm to dull the shame of failure, it's not a bad life. Like I say, there's tea.
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lol. . .im just greatful of who ever invented and introduced bank holiday. . .to them I salutè t è.
About time we were given a few more Ie St Georges bank holiday, ;-p .
you are missing your closing div for id contentleft (maybe this gets included in your ‘leave a reply’ default text). if you add an extra closing div before t_sidebar it will display correctly.
Ta very much Golden Boy (if, indeed, that is your real name). Not to blow my own trumpet too much but I had actually spotted the first /div thing since I posted this. However, popping one in there arses up some of the sidebar formatting (text properties change and those little dashed lines disappear).
Tip about checking the comments code was a good ‘un. Adding an extra /div in there gave a slightly better result but still cocked up sidebar formatting somehow (but strangely not on all same posts as putting adding a /div as above).
The odd and annoying thing is the inconsistency. The issue (and the /div fix formatting problems) only happen on certain posts. If I could find the common thread, life would be easier.
Thanks a lot for the help. Appreciate it.
Ah OK thought you had it missed. See I only noticed the extra </div> is missing when you can’t leave a reply, at least for the 3 from the 6 examples you gave in your post i.e. in the <p id=”respond”>Leave a Reply</p> section when you view source.
Not to get the copyright police out but I downloaded one of the non-working pages, added an extra </div> tag right before the empty <!– begin l_sidebar –> section (or before the <div id=”t_sidebar”> section begins) and it displayed fine, broken lines formatting as normal.
Let me know if you would like me to zip my sample up and send it to you. I’m not sure if it would help or not…
Interesting…
Popping the /div in around the sidebar stuff as suggested resulted in a similar issue – the sidebar formatting slips as mentioned (only in some articles – mostly the ones that were working).
I had a play around though as you’re definitely on the right track…
It does seem related to what gets loaded for comments. Tried putting the /div outside of the IF conditions in the comments.php (right at the end) and it improved matters. Most pages now rendered properly. The only exception were pages where comments are closed AND that had no comments.
A last bit of digging showed that the IF code for that condition contained its own /div so it was effectively doubling up. Dumping that one seems do have done the trick.
It may not be the cleanest code in the world but it seems to be working. You are truly golden, Golden Boy. Your sheen is brilliant and glorious and I probably owe you a pint. When my coup happens (and it will happen), you can be Minister for Technical Stuff.