Blog / Random thoughts and musings.

More Internet Explorer woes

While doing some testing a few days ago, I discovered that my web site was completely failing to load in Internet Explorer. I think the problem started a couple weeks ago when I upgraded WordPress to version 2.3. It seemed to be a bad Javascript interaction between WP2.3 and one of the plug-ins I was using, NextGEN Gallery. Disabling NextGEN Gallery resolved the problem. Now I am looking for a new way to insert images into my posts, but at least the page works again!

Problem solved, Internet Explorer not at fault

Well, NextGEN Gallery had nothing to do with it. Microsoft’s Script Debugger was pointing the finger at my “accordion” Javascript used for the right-hand sidebar. I troubleshot that for while, and eventually removed it entirely, but was still getting errors. The root cause ended up being the “intelligent” visual editor in WordPress. When I wrote the blog entry about Iggy, I copied and pasted the story into the blog from my Gmail e-mail window. Well, it appears that the e-mail wasn’t plain-text as it looked, but had gobs of embedded Javascript in it. If you use Gmail, you can right-click on your message text, and choose “This Frame -> View Frame Source” to see the mess. When I copied and pasted from Gmail into WordPress, the visual editor in WordPress displayed the text just fine, hiding from me the fact that there was lots of Javascript embedded within the text — Javascript that won’t function correctly outside of a Gmail window.

I’ve tried year after year to move to a visual HTML editor for web site work, but this has convinced me that it’s just not feasible. Time to go disable the editor and switch back to editing raw HTML. On the bright side, at least I can re-enable the NextGEN image gallery plug-in!