Empire Strikes Back

Just when I thought I would be safe from Internet Explorer by completely ignoring it's existence, came a note via Facebook from one of my cousins asking if I had shut down my weblog. After a quick glance of the blog (via Firefox) to make sure it was up and running, I quickly fired off a reply, confident that the site was indeed up and running and that was that. Then came a second notification from another cousin, this time more specifically stating that the blog was inaccessible -- via Internet Explorer 7. I launched VMWare to check the site on IE via the installed Windows XP system and saw the site was still accessible, but I was viewing it on IE 8, rolling back to IE 7 and bam, there it was, an error message saying the site could not be found. The same results were yielded by rolling back even further to IE 6. "Crap!" I thought to myself, as I scratched my head wondering what could be causing the problem and why only IE? Could it be a poorly written HTTP Access file? Nope. A PHP include gone awry? Nope. JavaScript? A-ha! Now we're onto something. After completely turning off all the JavaScript code on the page, the site was accessible again on all versions of IE, a double check on Firefox just to confirm it wasn't producing anymore unwanted side effects and then it was off to the tedious task of turning back on each script line by line until the error came back. The error definitely came back as soon as I turned on Lightbox v.2 (Lokesh Dhakar's link at http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/lightbox2/ seems to be unavailable as well) with the Scriptaculous effect. So now what? I am leaving the aforementioned effect on that page off for now until I have time to figure out which parts of the script was specifically causing the errors, the images that gets affected still work when clicked on although now sans the nice popup effect that Lightbox provides. What is baffling to me is that the same scripts work on other parts of the site, although admittedly, the weblog page is saddled with more scripts than necessary, a cleanup and a complete redesign is inevitable one of these days, but for now, lights off for Lightbox.

PS. Thanks for letting me know 'te Anna, and thanks for the headsup John.

posted at 7:56 AM |  |

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