Well as you all no doubt know I spent all day yesterday sorting out my Blog as it wouldn’t load properly in Internet Explorer 7 but it would in other browsers (Firefox, Chrome etc). But it didn’t just effect my site as there were many other Alex Jeffreys students effected, and I guess many other sites across the world had the same problem. When you attempt to go to the problem websites you got a message along the lines of this:-

“Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet Site …..
Operation Aborted”

Now the issue got more bizarre as the investigation went on, as I started to remove what I thought may be the offending items:- Video, flash, plugins etc. one by one, but the strange thing was it got to the point where I could directly put in the URL for a specific page and it would display fine with everything on it (including video, flash all my plugins… everything). However, if I attempted to naviagte to exactly the same page from anywhere else on my Blog, for example the Home page then this perfectly ‘good’ page would not display via that route! Very strange indeed, which led me to think it was something to do with  the Wordpress navigation which was the culprit. Alas, this was a total red-herring as what I tracked it down to be was one of the Social Media plugins I had installed, called “Onlywire Button”.

So if you have a similar sort of problem I suggest you deactivate and remove the code for each plugin one-by-one until you find the offending one. For me it was ‘Onlywire Button’, for you it may be something else.

TOTALLY IGNORE anything else as this is why it took me so long so fix. You see, even though my investigation and analysis was clearly indicating the problem was to do with something else by the fact the page could be satisfactorily displayed direct - ignore this - there still is apparently a problem with the page it just manifests itself when you try and click away. Bizarre but true.

I reckon the reason for the entire problem happening suddenly overnight was that Microsoft probably sent out an IE7 automatic update and this has had a disastrous effect on browsers across the world. I think that a new update will be coming out pretty soon to undo the problem they have created. But obviously, an actively visited blog can’t wait until Microsoft gets their act together, so if you are suffer from issues please use the above process until you isolate and remove the offending code.

Hope this is helpful. Certainly if anything happens like this in future I will just start removing code bit by bit and ignore anything else until I have exhausted all possibilities. Now back to catch up on a ‘lost day’ of effort. Thank you very much to all those that helped with suggestions throughout the day. Particularly Linda who’s initial suggest was along the right lines and Mark Austin who was working through things in a similar fashion to me plus all those that helped on Twitter.

Filed under: General

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