Good God, That's Frustrating!

HTML is a fickle bitch some days.

For the uninitiated, HTML is the coding one uses to create webpages -- or it's one of the kinds of coding one can use. It is comprised of obscure language and numbers and pixel sizes and many other little frustrating things. Even more frustrating is the fact that not all browsers will register the HTML coding found for a webpage in the same way. A flaw that might be generated in, say, Internet Explorer may not even be apparent in Firefox or Netscape Navigator. It's not universal, and thus it can be very difficult achieving a webpage that displays equally beautifully in every different web-surfing program.

My blogs have been carefully tweaked and messed with over time, thanks to generous readers in the past, and have essentially been carefully crafted to display beautifully in all browsers. Or that was the case...

So, I recently began having display problems with my other blog, The Cunting Linguist. Sadly, I failed to realize it might only be a Mac Firefox issue and not something applicable in all programs.

Anyhow, I asked for help, and one nice guy has been generous with his time, seeking to give me a helping hand with the page. Great! Not everything had remedied properly and it turned out this one persistent problem I was having was as a result of running a Mac, not because the coding itself was the issue, but because my Mac software's simply interpreting the code differently.

Well, the guy goes and emails me an edited version of the page source -- something which, in another life, I normally would've realized would be problematic, but that I failed to take note of on this particular day.

So, I go and upload buddy's altered version of the page source, see no changes, and carry on, business as usual. When I later go and write a posting and publish it, however, I'm met with the fact that the page isn't updating. "Fucking Blogger," I mutter, presuming the blog host is the source of my woes now.

Turns out that, no, it's not Blogger. It's because I'd published the page source sent to me by my helpful reader, and instead of the template being a fluid and changing template, the page source has a snapshot of that moment in time, with all the postings included as whole, etc, so it then becomes an immovable object, something that can't be updated or changed.

Moral of the story? ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP TEMPLATE.

I fortunately had an old one kicking around and knew what segments of the "immovable" snapshot template were corresponding to changes I've made over the past number of months, and thus have been able to cut and paste together a fixed, pretty accurate template that matched what I used to have.

Saved the day.

But, man, did I freak out for a few minutes before I solved my own problems. As if my headache wasn't throbbing enough before the fact. Whew! Now I've got some comfort food getting ready -- the rice cooker's starting to steam away and the Glico chicken curry's starting to bubble on the stove. Soon, my tummy will be happy, and thus, so will I. :)

Good god, HTML can be a bitch. And this is why I hate fucking around with templates. Every now and then you accidentally delete a character, and then all hell breaks loose! Grr!