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Image widget title and search bar have become links?

  1. acfitness
    Member

    Hi, i have had the same image widget and search bar on the front page, top right of my blog for over a month now. Yesterday I tried to search something in my blog by clicking the cursor into the search bar, and a link to my own forums opened in a new tab. Then I noticed that the title of the search bar, and the title of the image widget below it are also links to the same. This is blowing my mind. I have no idea how to fix it.

    Any help is welcome.

    Thanks, AC

    The blog I need help with is absoluteomnibus.com.

  2. thesacredpath
    Member

    Go to appearance > widgets and in the right sidebar, do you have something above the search widget? The reason I ask is that there appears a widget there when the page first starts to load, but it quickly disappears which leads me to think that there is an error in that widget. I think it is a text widget with a link to your forum?

  3. thesacredpath
    Member

    Looking at the XHTML validation report on your blog it is showing 15 errors and one warning, and one of the errors is listed as unrecoverable.

    Go to settings > writing and select "WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically" and save. Next, open each of the posts on your main page in the editor. Switch from the visual tab to the HTML tab and then back again (waiting for each to fully switch before switching back and the "update" the post. It is a little hard to tell exactly where the errors are on your page, but this is a start.

  4. acfitness
    Member

    Ok, so I did as you suggested: changed the XHTML, and switched back and forth with the 7 posts on my main page. Nothing changed.

    What did you mean by 15 errors and one warning, and one of the errors being unrecoverable? are those like viruses?

    I also checked, and there is no visible text, or otherwise, widget above the search widget.

    Any other ideas?

    Thanks, AC

  5. thesacredpath
    Member

    You know, there are several things that keep me from going further trying to help out with this, but the main thing is that your blog is absolutely freaking huge and eats so much of my limited wireless internet bandwidth (which I have to pay for) that I'm going to have to bow out and hopefully hallluke or possibly Panos will come round and help out with this. Your background image is nearly 14MB!!!! (Note that sentence rated 4 exclamation points!!!!) This is an absolute killer and will get your blog dumped into the trash by the search engines. They look at page loading times and total page sizes when determining search engine placement and they are going to walk away from yours very quickly and never come back.

    Sorry, but good luck.

  6. acfitness
    Member

    I understand the concerns from your side, but I am still new to blogging in general. I had no idea that my blog was any bigger than any other. I guess the way that I looked at it was that it was an opportunity to have my own "website", and WP is super easy to use.

    Please, before you walk, can you offer me any advice as to how to trim my blog, keep the size down so that I don't run into this again?

    Thanks so much. AC

  7. thesacredpath
    Member

    Do you have the CSS upgrade?

  8. acfitness
    Member

    No, I don't know much about it, but I have been interested in getting it and I'm willing to learn.

    I got rid of that 14MB background image, and replaced it with one that is under 2MB. Not sure if that's going to help, but I really want to make this blog as efficient as possible.

  9. thesacredpath
    Member

    @AC, here is your background run through photoshop and saved for web and devices as a jpg. It comes in at around 430k. Still large, but much better.

    http://flippintestblog.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/aobackground101-ps-opt.jpg

  10. thesacredpath
    Member

    Without the CSS upgrade, things get a little more difficult with coraline since it does not have a background declared for the content area. I did a crop on the image and tiled it vertically and you can see the results here: http://flippintestblog.wordpress.com/ .

    You could also cut out the center screened areas that go be behind the sidebars and just leave the content and sidebar areas white. Or as an alternate if you could get the side vertical sections (without the center screened section) down small enough with a PNG so you could have a transparent background then you could assign an background color for the content/sidebar area. Perhaps a light grey like #EEEEEE or #DDDDDD.

  11. acfitness
    Member

    That's amazing. I don't have photoshop, i've been using Fireworks. It will only let me save an image as a jpg. Don't know why. Thanks for taking the time to do that.

    I'm going to figure all this stuff out, and with people like you helping me it, well, really helps.

    Any other ideas as to my original dilemma? The XHTML errors and warning?

  12. thesacredpath
    Member

    There is an error somewhere in either a post or in a sidebar widget that is causing the issue. I'll take a look at it in a few hours and see what I can find. Sometimes it can take a good bit of time to find the issues, but now that your blog is zinging along I can take a look without eating mega bandwidth.

    That background image I made you can download to your computer and then upload to your blog if you haven't done so already.

  13. thesacredpath
    Member

    Also if you are on Fireworks CS3, 4 or 5, on the "file" menu there should be a "save for web & devices. That allows you to save as just about any file type and will optimize the image for the web. On the top right when saving as a jpg, you can select the amount of compression. I saved this one as "low" and it still looks good.

  14. thesacredpath
    Member

    You know, I actually like the background you have up now better. It is there and provides a nice border, but doesn't distract as much and the busy colored one of all the comics.

  15. acfitness
    Member

    SP, thanks so much for your help; you're a technological superhero. As for the background, I think you may be right. I have a feeling the blog is going to go through some changes this week.

    It's almost 11pm here, so I'm going to hit the hay. I'm in no rush, however I do appreciate the hand. Talk to you in the morning.

    Thanks again, AC

  16. thesacredpath
    Member

    OK I have my fingers crossed on the following fixes. I had to copy the source code for your page out and then do validations and fixes from within my XHTML editing program. With the following, supposedly you will be down to only 1 error, and that is a piddly little thing you can do nothing about. I've had to modify a few things a little from your original code, and there were stray tr and td tags getting inserted that I have no idea where they came from (hopefully they weren't inserted by the theme itself). After you make the following corrections, we shall see. (I recreated all your text widgets in one of my test blogs and with the following, things work fine and only came up with that one odd error we aren't going to worry about.

    For AO! Message boards text widget replace the code you have with this.

    <p><a href="http://absoluteomnibus.freeforums.org/" target="blank"><img title="authority1" src="http://absoluteandomnibus.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/aoforumlogo1.png" alt="" width="200" height="100" /></a></p><p><a href="http://absoluteomnibus.freeforums.org/" target="blank">Chat it up in the AO! Forums!</a></p>

    In the C2E2 text widget, delete everything in that widget and put the following

    <p><a href="http://www.c2e2.com/" target="_blank"><img width="200" height="400" title="C2E2" src="http://absoluteandomnibus.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/c2e2_2011_200x400.gif"></a></p>

    In the Con List From text widget delete everything and replace with this

    <p><a href="http://firstaidcomics.wordpress.com/shows/" target="_blank"><img width="200" height="100" title="Weekly New Releases" src="http://absoluteandomnibus.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/firstaid200x100.png"></a></p>

  17. thesacredpath
    Member

    @AC, two additional suggestions for you.

    1. Go to settings > writing and select "WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically" and save (if you do not have that set already). This will keep XHTML errors from creeping in and causing you issues.

    2. If you use the post or page editor to prepare the code to put into text widgets, do not use the caption feature. It screws up text widgets. If you are not using a very small image that you want the text to wrap around, always select "none" as the alignment. Do not use left or right. Again it can mess things up.

  18. acfitness
    Member

    My friend, as far as I can tell everything is working great. Thanks so much for your help. I wish there was some way I could repay it. I guess all I can do is learn more and bug you less.

    On that note, I do have one unresolved question in the forums about the alignment on this page:

    http://absoluteomnibus.com/absolutes-and-omnibi/dark-horse-omnibus-editions/

    For some reason so one has touched it in nearly a week.

    Otherwise, be well, I'm sure I'll talk to you soon.

    Thanks again.

    AC

  19. thesacredpath
    Member

    @AC, you are welcome. There were some things in the code that was causing issues. A side effect of that was that your site went down to only the 1 insignificant error.

    I'll have a look at the other thread. Sometimes when they get bumped off the first page of the forum they sort of get lost.

  20. thesacredpath
    Member

    @AC, since the table issue is off topic from this thread, I found the other thread and replied there. Make the corrections suggested and let's see what it looks like after that.

    http://en.forums.wordpress.com/topic/html-table-not-showing-on-page?replies=7#post-544694

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