A very weird thing

Something may be going on with my blog, something that can’t be my doing: When my blog is accessed from the web address, all the sidebars disappear. That means none of the regular links are visible, and that includes the list of tags on the left side, the list of posts on the right side (and the various external links). Instead, they ALL appear at the very bottom of the page. However, if one clicks on the title of a post, it opens with all the sidebars displaying normally. I have absolutely NO idea why this has happened.

I first noticed it late last week when I published a post in exactly the same way I always do, and when I went back to the blog, all the sidebars were gone. I accessed it in three different browsers—Chrome, Safari, and Firefox—and all were the same. I tried accessing it on my iPad using Safari and Firefox, and, again, it was the same story (on my phone, it’s the normal sidebar-less version maximised for devices).

Naturally, I started Googling to find answers, but as near as I can tell, no one has reported anything similar for several years, and even then it was related to mistakes they’d made. The advice back then was that it was a conflict in the code when a page is rendered in https but has elements that aren’t https-compatible. Back in late 2018, I had to upgrade several things to fix similar, but different issues: Sidebar items weren’t displaying because they weren’t https-compatible, but the sidebars themselves were still there. I haven’t touched it since then. I opened each visible blog post in a new window under the theory that if there was something in one of them causing the problem, it ought to cause the problem in any window. They all displayed normally.

Because I never touched any of the blog settings, my first guess was that the Blogger team must’ve made some changes to the underlying code that broke my customisations. The years-old instructions to fix the problem back in the old days was to increase the width of the display, so I did that: It changed nothing.

So, for now, I have no idea how to fix whatever’s wrong. In the meantime, if you want to access the sidebars, click on the title of any post and they’ll be back where they’re supposed to be. I’ll keep trying to figure out what the hell happened and how to fix it, but, for now, that’s the only solution I can offer.

I certainly don’t need yet another new problem to fix, but here were are.