blogmaking.net

I was poking around my site and I noticed that my “About blogmaking.net” page’s format had gone a little haywire. The right sidebar looked like it had completely disappeared. It hadn’t, completely anyway, it was way off on the bottom left side of the page, mostly off screen, I could just see the end of a long title. Now plaintxt.org do such good and well respected themes and my other pages (Archives, Links, Guide to Making a WordPress blog) all work so I figured it had to be something I did, not the theme’s fault.

So the first thing I suspected was there was some unwanted markup code in my page text. The easiest way of working this out is to go to Options/Writing and make sure that “Users should use the visual rich editor by default” is UNCHECKED (ie you are using the html editor not the rich visual editor).

You might also be able to click on the “html” tag in the visual rich editor to examine the html. But I don’t really trust the popup html editor in the visual rich interface (eg when I’ve posted video embeds in the popup editor they often just disappear).

Once you’re looking at the html, see if you can find any unwanted or strange code. Especially, <div>s or </div>s because these can play havoc on your theme if they are not supposed to be there. Basically, remove anything that looks like markup (ie in <>s) to be absolutely sure (you can probably leave links, images and italic/bold/format type markups if you can recognise them, I think they’re unlikely to affect the page). Save and reload your page. If it now works then you know that was the problem.

When I went into the html editor I found about seven lots of <div></div>s littered around the page, who knows how they got there. When I removed them, my “About blogmaking.net” page went back to working perfectly.

Be aware that sometimes, even just re-editing in the visual rich editor can sometimes muck around with your page’s coding, and be especially careful about editing pages with video embeds in the video rich editor because it can handle them quite strangely. Last time I tried, not only did the video disappear it replaced them with some weird <param> tags that broke the formatting of my page. I had to switch on the html editor, remove the unwanted code and repaste the video embeds.