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December 27, 2004

Technical problem, sigh
Posted by Patrick at 12:41 PM * 27 comments

This is Patrick, not Teresa, who’s just noticed that, viewed with Safari, Making Light’s entire left-hand column now appears to be blank, and the material that belongs in the left-hand column now sits at the bottom of the right-hand column.

We usually use Firefox, so we’ve just now noticed this. I wonder if it dates from our attempts to fix the wretched problems with Making Light in Microsoft Internet Exploder. Is it happening to other Safari users? And do any of our technically-adept readers have any suggestions?

UPDATE: Problem solved, thanks to Andrew Willett. Glory.

Comments on Technical problem, sigh:
#1 ::: Tracina ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 12:59 PM:

Patrick, I'm using Safari 1.2.1 and getting that problem. I wasn't getting it on Thursday, which is the last day I was here until today, if that helps you narrow the timeframe.

#2 ::: Will "scifantasy" Frank ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:18 PM:

Oddly, I'm getting that problem (I'm at home on a G4 iMac, Safari 1.2.4) on the main Making Light page, but not, as example, this page.

#3 ::: Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:21 PM:

Yeah, it appears to be the front page only.

#4 ::: Andrew Willett ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:28 PM:

To back up Tracina: The whatever-it-is dates back to sometime Friday. My best guess is that it's a mangled tag in a 12/24 entry, which I'll go look into right now.

#5 ::: Andrew Willett ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:33 PM:

Patrick, there's a </blockquote> missing from the end of the Maryland song.

#6 ::: Tracina ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:46 PM:

Whatever you just did fixed the problem for me.

#7 ::: Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:46 PM:

That did it! Thank you so much, Andrew.

#8 ::: Paula Helm Murray ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 01:52 PM:

It's all back in the right places!

#9 ::: Claude Muncey ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 02:20 PM:

Nice catch, Andrew.

#10 ::: Jean Dudley ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 02:27 PM:

Same issue here. It started when I added Google ads to the template per instructions provided by GoogleAdsense.

Go see.

Using Safary 1.2.4

#11 ::: Kate Nepveu ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 02:29 PM:

I wonder if it dates from our attempts to fix the wretched problems with Making Light in Microsoft Internet Exploder.

Is this the place to mention Dan Blum's fix for long comment pages being cut off that worked for me in IE & Opera 7?

(It was in the middle of an open thread so I wasn't sure if it had been seen.)

#12 ::: BethN ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 03:08 PM:

Yay! Everything's back where it belongs! One small corner of the world where all is now ok.

#13 ::: Graydon ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 03:15 PM:

Just as a data point -- I was (not) seeing the same thing as the Safari users were with Konqueror 3.3.2.

So at least we know that the Apple guys aren't messing too much with KHTML's tendency to give you exactly what the page says. :)

#14 ::: Jean Dudley ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 03:35 PM:

Er. Um. Never mind. It was an overly-wide image that was making my sidebar slide to the bottom. Oops.

But on the plus side, I did manage to find all the mising blockquote tags.

Jean Dudley.

#15 ::: xeger ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 04:07 PM:

Heh. I mentioned this in the last open thread, because I wasn't sure if it was just me - but I'm very glad to see it fixed :)

#16 ::: Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 04:07 PM:

Kate, I followed Dan Blum's suggestion, but it seems to have worked only for some MSIE users, not all of them. So I'm a bit at a loss.

#17 ::: Dan Blum ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 04:20 PM:

Hmm. Looking at the source for this page, I don't see a 'div style="clear:both;"' tag at the bottom, which was my (second) suggested solution. Did you take it out again after trying it?

#18 ::: Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 04:31 PM:

Someone around here is really confused and it's probably not you. I thought I'd added it to the individual archive template. Now I have. MSIE users, do let us know if the bug persists. (Flush your cache first, though.)

#19 ::: Dan Blum ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 04:43 PM:

It's working for me now, even without flushing the cache.

#20 ::: Kate Nepveu ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 04:47 PM:

Long comment pages now work too in Opera 7. Thank you!

#21 ::: Avram ::: (view all by) ::: December 27, 2004, 07:55 PM:

Patrick, Teresa, are you familiar with Markdown? It's a perl script -- works with Moveable Type 2.6 or better, and as a BBEdit filter, and there's an OSX service version that should work in most any OSX program -- that takes some pretty simple formatting and turns it into HTML. Basically, it lets you format a blog post like an email message, turning blocks of text preceded by > symbols into BLOCKQUOTEs, turning _this_ into this, and a few other things. Here are the basics, and there's a CGI dingus you can use to try it out. And you can drop ordinary HTML in there too, so you don't have to give up those SPAN tags.

It should make it harder to forget to close BLOCKQUOTEs.

#22 ::: Jurie ::: (view all by) ::: December 28, 2004, 04:53 AM:

Hmmm.... Using Safari 1.2.4. I now see the "Commercial airspace" much broader than the images in the left column. And I see no right column at all. That's on this page.

#23 ::: Dan Blum ::: (view all by) ::: December 28, 2004, 09:47 AM:

I would look at that, but I am somewhat hampered by not having a Mac available (Safari isn't available for Windows, right?).

Looking at the page source, I don't see anything that would make the comments pages in general act differently from the main page - the "Commercial Airspace" appears on the main page as well, with the same "sidetitle" class, and all other salient features look the same to my (undereducated) eye. Do the other comments pages look wacky in Safari, or just this one?

#24 ::: Tracina ::: (view all by) ::: December 28, 2004, 10:52 AM:

I'm not getting the same problem Jurie is; all the pages look fine to me now.

#25 ::: Dan Blum ::: (view all by) ::: December 28, 2004, 11:47 AM:

That, combined with Jean's comment above, leads me to think that one of the ads is wider than the others and is causing Safari to choke. This is assuming that the ads are chosen randomly for display, so that different users will see different sets - if that's not the case, then never mind.

#26 ::: Jacob Sommer ::: (view all by) ::: December 29, 2004, 06:15 PM:

Oddly enough I haven't had that problem myself at any point prior to this. Just a data point.

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