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.

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Unordered List In Sidebar

Unordered List

Newbies using New Blogger template may be better off using the Link List in the Page Elements. It is easier; however, it is more difficult to backup the Link List widget than to just backup the Page Element.


(Page Element and Widget are different names for the same thing--one is more accssible to you (through the Layout page) and the other, in the template, you can go into more deeply as far as editing it IF you know how!)

So I prefer the ul list, whose html code I can keep backed up in a Notepad file or other plain-text program, in an html/javascript page element.



If you are using a Classic template, you will need a list of this sort for the sidebar.

Put this after or at least not inside the other ul lists in the sidebar in the template.


Below is the code for a list of links that you could put in your sidebar via the template. The code could also be used in a html/javascript Page Element (in New Blogger). First one is an example of a link.

<h2>New Category</h2>

<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.zandria.us/">Keep Up With Me </a> </li>
<li>list another one!
<li>list another one!
</ul>


If your template uses a particular "class" for it's titles in the sidebar, just imitate (copy) them in order for your new list titles to match the old ones.

For a second list, if needed, do another title and pair of start and end tags and fill in the middle part.


For just one link in the sidebar, use code as below:
<a href="http://rodentia.blogspot.com/The" rat="" squeaks=""></a>

The difference between an unordered list as above and an ordered list which Numbers your list is merely using an ol tag instead of the ul tag!

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