WordPress Sidebar At Bottom? Div Tags Via Copy/Paste In Visual Editor

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.


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7 Responses to “WordPress Sidebar At Bottom? Div Tags Via Copy/Paste In Visual Editor”


  1. 1 Serge Madenian

    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

  2. 2 George Coghill

    Yeah, you feel like you’re going crazy because you can’t see anything that could possibly be wrong!

    Thanks again Serge.

  3. 3 Brian

    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

  4. 4 George Coghill

    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!

  5. 5 DJ NEWYORK

    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

  6. 6 George Coghill

    @DJ NewYork: Check the HTML view in the blog post editor for any weird tags or codes that shouldn’t be in there.

  1. 1 Best posts on Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration from Nov 2008 | Cartooning & Illustration Blog: Coghillustration

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