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Please help me out - Sidebar Query

  1. andiio
    Member

    I have a problem, I would really *really* appreciate it if someone could take a quick look and help me out. I think this is a relatively simple thing to fix, but I can’t figure this one out for the life of me!!

    When users are logged in, my website displays fine, however when user’s are not logged in, individual posts don’t display properly. The sidebar is positioned at the bottom and a thin divider extends too far across the screen.

    I've narrowed the second problem down to the footer, if I remove it then the thin divider issue goes, however the sidebar issue remains regardless.

    You can see what i’m talking about here, for example;
    http://www.techcritic.co.uk/news/total-addiction-world-of-warcraft/

    Please help, I’ve spent the past 2 days trying to work this one out, I’m clawing my hair out! I've searched and searched but to no avail.

    Any help would be greatly appreciated!

  2. thesacredpath
    Member

    Sorry, you are in the wrong forum and need to head over to http://wordpress.ORG/support/ as that is where self-hosted wordpress blogs using the software from wordpress.ORG are supported.

    These forums are for those hosted here on the wordpress.COM free hosting service and things here work differently and our answers typically will not work for you.

    If you do not know the difference, see this support document: http://en.support.wordpress.com/com-vs-org/ .

  3. andiio
    Member

    I realised my mistake afterwards, but I was hoping someone might be able to help me out all the same. Google searches would suggest that this is an issue for both wordpress.com users and also stand-alone wordpress.org users, and i'm stumped :(

  4. thesacredpath
    Member

    The thing is we are familiar with the themes here, and we have no experience with the theme you are using, and we have no idea what changes you have made to the theme.

    The WOW post you reference, according to the W3C validator, has 30 errors on that page. You need to go through and correct those errors. Likely one of them is causing the issue, and since it apparently is happening on all single-post pages, my guess would be that it is something in your sidebar causing the issue.

    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.techcritic.co.uk%2Fnews%2Ftotal-addiction-world-of-warcraft%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

    You might try removing all widgets from the sidebar (drag them to the "inactive widget area") and then put them back in one at a time until you find the one that is causing the issue

  5. andiio
    Member

    I figured that might be the problem, I haven't made any changes to the theme (yet) but I guess that still doesn't help you guys out, haha!

    I'll have a little look through the validator's points (thank you very much for linking me to that) and i'll have a fiddle with the sidebar and see what I can acomplish!

    Once the .org forums are back online I'll leave this thread dead in the water as I guess I don't belong here, but in the meantime i'll keep it updated with anything I find.

  6. thesacredpath
    Member

    From looking at the errors, many of them are apparently in the base theme you are using. I would contact the designer.

  7. andiio
    Member

    Thanks for your responses, thesacredpath.

    I've tried but to no avail, so I'm attempting to fix them myself, which I do realise is nigh on pointless as I don't have the technical know-how to do so, but I'm gonna give it a shot anyway.

  8. thesacredpath
    Member

    The errors in the youtube you can leave alone basically. (Google/youtube can't seem to create compliant code).

  9. thesacredpath
    Member

    OK, I don't normally do this, but the issue I'm pretty sure is with the code for the categories and tags. The theme author has enclosed paragraph tags within a span tag and that is not allowed. General example of what the theme author did:

    <span><p>text and such here</p></span>

    Span tags have to be within a block level element such as "p" tags as below:

    <p><span>text and such here</span></p>

  10. andiio
    Member

    Yeah there's a lot of work there it seems. I'm looking for the serious problems that are causing my layout issues, presumably this would be the lack of closing the </div> tag.

    I've included another close in the footer yet it hasn't worked, don't suppose you've got any idea?

  11. andiio
    Member

    Ah brilliant, I didn't refresh to see your post. I'll have a look now! I really do appreciate the effort by the way. Many thanks for your help so far!

  12. thesacredpath
    Member

    Hopefully that works. The other possibility is that the author meant to use a div with the attribute outside of the "p" elements. If moving the span tags inside doesn't fix it, try moving them back outside and turning them into div's.

  13. andiio
    Member

    Thank you, i'll look into that too.

    I've just had a thought though, do you know what happens to a WordPress blog when a user logs in? I'm not sure if you saw in my first post of the topic, but these issues are not present when a user is logged in, so I'm thinking if I could find out the difference then I could merely replicate what a logged in person is shown, to the general public. If that makes sense?

  14. timethief
    Member

    @TSP
    ah ah ah :(

  15. thesacredpath
    Member

    @andilo, that puzzles me too. The thing is, I think your best bet is to contact the theme designer with the issue. The issue I mentioned above needs to be corrected though at any rate.

  16. thesacredpath
    Member

    @TT, what are they going to do? take away my secret decoder ring?

    :-)

  17. andiio
    Member

    I thank you for your efforts to help me anyway, sorry if I got you in some sort of trouble :S haha. What's wrong with helping out another human being, even though it may be on the wrong forum, i'll never know.

    Alright i'll leave it for now anyway, I don't want to make the situation worse! Thanks very much for your help, I genuinely do appreciate it.

    :)

  18. timethief
    Member

    TSP
    I need your secret decoder ring HELP! A Firefox update just wiped out all kinds of stuff I can't seem to fix :( aarrghhh!

  19. thesacredpath
    Member

    @andilo, don't worry about it, no one is in trouble. We shy away from answering questions about .ORG blogs here in these forums since it can confuse bloggers here at wordpress.COM when they later come to one of these threads and think it applies to them. Since things here work differently and we have many restrictions on what we can do, the answers for .COM and .ORG users can be quite different.

  20. thesacredpath
    Member

    @TT,

    PEM me about it.

    Blasted posting delay. I've now got to wait 30 seconds or so before I can post this comment.

  21. missingmann
    Member

    Hello - Help!!!!! Total newbie here - I use Blogger.com which I find really user friendly being a 51 year old technophobe but having signed up here tonight I am really struggling! My blog is here: http://www.missingmann.wordpress.com - just look at it - it's a mess and I can't find anyway of fixing it. Why aren't the two posts appearing on the front page? Why can't I get rid of the tasteful grey box that dominates the front page?

    Any help would be much appreciated. At least on blogger there's a button for viewing the blog but not here.

    Thanks.

    David

  22. thesacredpath
    Member

    The taste(less) grey box is part of the theme. It is to display featured posts/images. You can get a better idea of what this theme is about by reading these links.

    http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/new-theme-structure/
    http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2010/05/01/introduction-to-structure/

    Structure has a lot of advanced features and you will need to familiarize yourself with them.

    The reason the video is not showing on the main page is that in structure, only an excerpt is shown on the main page with a read more link, and it will not show images or videos on the main page in the excerpts by default.

    Read the links and then see if perhaps another theme might not be a better fit for you.

  23. missingmann
    Member

    Many thanks - I will endeavour to persevere! I see a return to Blogger looming as I have very limited patience these days.

    All the best.

    David

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