Fixing tech problems again

Seems like I’ve been spending a lot of time fixing tech problems. It’s my least favourite thing to do, not the least because they always take time and energy to sort out. Sometimes I know what to do, and sometimes I make a lucky guess, but too many times I have to do a lot of research to figure out what to do. Still, I get there in the end—eventually. This week (so far?) I finished two such repair missions.

Last Sunday, I published ”A very weird thing”, a post about problems I was having with this blog. It’s something I was trying to figure out for the past week, and today I finally succeeded.

After nearly a week without being able to fix the problem, I posted to my personal Facebook asking for people to got to the blog and let me know what they saw. I was trying to find out if the problem was only there for some users, and if so, who they were. Because of their responses, I was able to focus my suspicion on one post that, I was pretty sure, was the last one I posted before the problem appeared.

I put that post into draft mode (“unpublished” it), refreshed the page, and sacré bleu, the sidebars reappeared! I tried editing the text, removing a graphic, and republishing, and the sidebars disappeared. Then I tried removing a link and republishing and the sidebars disappeared again. It didn’t matter which link I left out, or if I left out both, so there had to be something else wrong with it.

And then I saw it: At the very end of the HTML code for the post was one thing: “<div>” with no closing tag. I deleted it, republished the post, and the sidebars were back. That ONE thing threw the whole page into chaos. It wasn’t what I thought was causing it, but, hey, a win’s a win.

The post that caused the problem was last week’s routine announcement of my newest podcast episode. All I do when I publish one of those posts is I open the previous one and change the episode number and name and the permalink to the episode on the podcast site. The orphaned tag ended up in last week’s post because the previous week I’d added a note to the end of the post, and Blogger added the tag and closing tag. I opened that post last week, updated it as usual, and deleted the note, BUT I didn’t notice the orphaned tag.

The moral of the story is that the problem is almost certainly always in the code (joking—only just). I didn’t notice the orphaned tag because I didn’t expect to see it there, and so, and didn’t look carefully enough. I also didn’t think that post was a problem because I’ve been doing one every week without this happening. However, when folks with all sorts of systems were reporting the same thing, I decided to check the post that, it turned out, had caused the whole thing,

The best way to prevent this in the future is to have a properly formatted template to use instead of opening the previous post and updating it (which was kind of lazy, really). I normally scan teh HTML code of every post before I publish, and I need to make sure I look at even routine posts, too.

The other problem was a bit simpler: I wanted to print out some more pages for the “to do” lists in the “What’s Up?” section of my personal organisation system (and I meant to talk about that part of the system last month—oops). However, I hadn’t used my printer in awhile, and it didn’t print any black ink. I used the menus on the printer to test various things, clean nozzles, etc., and finally got the pages printed. Now, I’m all set for the rest of the year—but I’ll need to come up with some things to print from time to time to keep the machine ready to use.

What these two issues and the recent issues with my ethernet switch (still unresolved, but with the same workaround) is that they all were things I needed to fix. Nigel would’ve taken care of the ethernet switch and printer problems, which would’ve meant dealing with my blog problem would’ve been much easier for me to deal with. As it was, I’ve been feeling pretty overwhelmed by it all, and when the printer joined the Tech Problem Festival, my first reaction was, “what now?!”

Dealing with so those issues so close together was frustrating and annoying, and, sure, I feel good that I fixed two of them (and found a good workaround for the ethernet switch problem), but I’d absolutely rather not have several happening at once. We don’t get a say in such things, of course, and when issues to solve pile up seemingly all at once, it can feel like a cruel twist of fate. Random chance like that can be annoying, but when lots of good things happen in a row, do we ever think how awesome it is we got a run of good luck? Probably not.

In any case, this week I finished two repair missions. I think I’ll just celebrate the win.