A non-cartooning post here, but when I run into issues with the blog and find solutions for the errors, I like to pass them along.
I recently had a bizarre problem with this blog: the Sidebar was appearing way at the bottom of the home page, at the end of the last post entry. I saw some potential fixes for this on the wondeful web, and all seemed to point at an unclosed < div > tag.
My first mistake was looking at the most recent post (which had an oversized image that I fixed). turns out the error cropped up a couple posts earlier and I just hadn’t been to the home page in a while to notice.
The fix was indeed < div > tag related. Here’s how I fixed it after a bunch of troubleshooting and scouring the code — or rather how it was introduced into the post in the first place and how to avoid it…
The short answer is that I had introduced these errant div tags into the post by copying and pasting a post in the Visual Editor mode from a Page to a Post (I had inadvertently created a Page instead of a Post, and so just copy/pasted the content — which included an image — from the Page via the visual editor to a new Post via the visual editor.
I am not sure if the image had anything to do with it, but I am guessing this is probably the case.
I thought I would post this for anyone else out there having a similar issue.
In summary:
• If you are having issues with your WordPress sidebar jumping to the bottom of your home page, check the HTML of all the posts currently featured on the home page — most likely one of them has those div tags in there
• Take this as a warning to use the HTML editor in WordPress if you need to copy/paste from a Post or Page to another Post or Page.
Also a thanks to Serge Madenian, his post on the ‘sidebar at bottom’ issue led me to look into the div tag as a possible culprit. And although I found the problem in the meantime, he had quickly replied to my comment on his posts asking for assistance. Thanks Serge!
*** Note: For what it’s worth, I did this using the Safari browser in OS X 10.5 — not sure if this plays a part or not but thought I would mention it.
by George Coghill
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you’re welcome. Issues like this are pretty frustrating especially in your case where this was something that happened a while back and you didn’t notice. Good catch on the visual editor copying.
Serge
Yeah, you feel like you’re going crazy because you can’t see anything that could possibly be wrong!
Thanks again Serge.
Hey George,
Great post… such a silly mistake but you turned up at the top of my Google search and thank God this is exactly what happened to me!!!
Thanks for writing!
Brian
Hey no prob man, that’s why I posted the info. I was going nuts trying to figure it out and once I did, I figured I would save someone else the stress. Glad it helped!
still having the same problem… I already threw away the post that I remember doing this on. Does it take a while or where do I go in the code exactly to close the code??
please help, thanks
@DJ NewYork: Check the HTML view in the blog post editor for any weird tags or codes that shouldn’t be in there.