Low Sidebar

These are my rote instructions when sidebar nosedives happen, which mostly occur in the Internet Explorer browser. I don't know that it happens very much in Firefox, but I know other horror stories about Firefox, so don't get excited!

But, on to our problem! Sometimes it's simple, sometimes not.

• Your sidebar may be going to the bottom because your server is crazy due to being worked on by Blogger. Your sidebar doesn't begin at the top like it's supposed to.
  
• Wrong code or missing pieces of code sometimes cause this kind of jump or aberration.
  
• It is probable you'll have to get out of Compose mode and enter Html mode in order to see wrong code in the posts.
  
• It is possible you have posted too large a photo or too long a link. Change that and it might go back to the top of the page. Look for a misstated IMG code.
  
• Possibly your main column width and sidebar exceed allowable Content width or header width.
  
• Sometimes one of the "floats" in the template will get changed for some reason and be wrong. Investigate. Options are "left", "right", and "none".
  
• If you suspect it may be caused by something in a particular post, you could Save as Draft to remove it temporarily and see if it was the cause. Then you can Publish it again later to put it back in place.
  
• Also, sometimes I've found it to be caused by just getting some wrong or missing code in the template or in a recent post. You might have one tag or symbol too many or too few. If you've deleted some things, maybe you left one little piece of nonsense code behind that's confusing the template.
  
• Once it was caused in a friend's site by a -->, the closing tag for hiding a comment; it had no start tag, was just wrongly there!

Play Sherlock Holmes and test some changes without saving them until you use Preview and see that the change works and does no harm. It's hard, but I don't know any easy way.

To test posts one at a time, use the Permalink feature; if you click on the Post Title, your site will show only that one post. When you keep doing the blog like that, you MAY find a single post that pushes the sidebar down and that post will be the cause of your trouble. In other cases, of course, the trouble is coming from the sidebar and you just have to figure it out.

To hear all this put another way, go to Peter's post about it or Chuck's post.