Oops! Slight Technical Hitch - Permalinks

February 5, 2008 · Filed Under Blogging · Comment 

Oh dear. I tried to be clever and implement an SEO optimization - and as a result anyone who found a search engine result leading to my site and clicked on said link would have found a nasty 404 - page not found message.

Luckily I caught on to the problem quite quickly, and I believe I have resolved it, thanks to this post, and thanks to the plugin that you can find here.

Now I can play with things like permalinks and not have to worry too much about nasty collateral effects!

Thanks to Google, I found the solution quickly. Phew!

Oh the joys of being an amateur webmaster.

Please accept my apologies if my tinkering caused problems.

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Fixed It!

January 22, 2008 · Filed Under This blog · 2 Comments 

I wanted to switch the commenting system off on one of my posts, so I did. The only trouble was the side effect. The right hand side bar took umbridge and slid down to beneath the central column, which you are reading now.

After posting on the Wordpress support forums, someone suggested that there was a missing opening or closing <div> - a technical web design thing (divs come in pairs - one opens and then there should be another that closes). Luckily I know what these things are, and, more or less, what they do (div = divider), so I set about hunting down the errant piece of HTML. At first, despite my best efforts, I could not track the blasted thing down. Really annoying, I can tell you.

Well, I’m pleased to say that during a quiet moment today I managed to compare the code used in this site with the original code developed by one Brian Gardener, and, I spotted the error, and corrected it. Now I can turn the comment system off and on and the side bar does not become all grumpy. Something of a relief.

And who was to blame for the error? Yep, you guessed: it was tinkering little old me. I had inserted Google Analytics code and inadvertently erased a <div> tag. Twit. Oh well, you live and learn. I shall be more careful next time.

Still, all the hunting around gave me more of an idea as to how these Wordpress pages are created. Very interesting. Did you know that you are not looking at one HTML page, but four bits of HTML all stitched together courtesy of the magic of PHP? Very clever stuff.

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