What a nightmare! I was so confident my blog looked great! Then, I get an email from a compassionate soul. “I was on your site,” the email read, “but I could not see your videos.” WHAT? What did he mean he could not see my videos? My heart sunk! I immediately typed my blog’s url on the address bar and held my breath as I waited for it to come up. I breathed a sigh of relief as I saw my sight come up intact, every video, every tab, every word was there.
Now, I knew this guy would not play that kind of a joke on me. So, I asked him to check again. Once more he could not see the videos. So, I finally asked the right question, “What browser are you using?” The answer came back “Internet Explorer.” Well, I use Firefox for most everything, but since I do have IE installed in my PC, I opened the browser to see if that had anything to do with it. Low and behold, my blog looked like a mess! Page error messages, no videos, and no opt-in box were just some of the immediate damages I could survey.
Needless to say, I spent the next day and a half trying to figure out what on earth was the problem. Why did everything look fine on firefox, but totally messed up on IE? Now, because I don’t want you to have to go through this incredibly exhausting and painful process, let me tell you what I found out and how I was finally able to fix things!
First of all, DO NOT copy and paste your posts directly from Word unto your blog. When you do that, you are not only copying the content, but all of Word’s formatting data as well. So, if you copied and pasted from word, and you open your admin page for WordPress using IE, you will see a bunch of really strange commands at the beginning of your posts.
To fix this particular problem, you need to re-post your blog posts! Yep, you read it right. You need to go back and redo all your posts. If you don’t have that many, it might be easier to just start over, but if you have a lot, then set aside some time when you are relaxed and distraction-free, grab a cup of coffee, and do the following. Open your posts one at a time. Highlight and cut the content of the post. Paste it unto a Notepad (regular old plain notepad), clean up any strange tags or formatting that might appear. Next, highlight and copy the post. Back at your WP dashboard, you will see in the “Visual” tab view of your post two clipboards (One with a “W”, and ont with a “T”), click the one with the “T” and paste the content unto that clipboard. Hit “Update”. Your content should now appear without any glitches. Now keep in mind that this is ONLY for text. We will talk about video in a minute.
To keep this from happening in the future, either avoid copying from Word all together, or use the clipboard with the “W” when you go to paste your content. Whenever possible, view your new posts in both IE and your regular browser, to make sure everything is in order.
Now, as far as videos are concerned, you need to be aware that WordPress itself is a bit finicky about the way videos are embedded unto the blogs. So, if you are embedding a video using the code provided by YouTube or Viddler, you might already know that you MUST remove the last “” tag in order to avoid a 404 error. Well, if you want your video to show in IE at all, you need to remove EVERYTHING form the embed code other than what is between the actual embed tags. So, you will ONLY add to the HTML view of the “Add Post” page the part of the code that begins with “<embed></embed>” and ends with “”. Don’t worry. The truth of the matter is that all of that other code is redundant anyway, so your video will run just fine.
If after fixing all these little, but annoying and time consuming, details your blog still won’t look the way it’s supposed to, you might want to consider changing the theme. See, IE parses the theme information differently than do the other browsers. So, they might just be having a hard time understanding all the “instructions” that come with your particular theme of choice. The good news is, that this can be done without affecting your content. The bad news is that you might not find another theme you love as much as the one you had.
I REALLY hope that helps and that it saves you some of the aggravation and headaches I had to go through! That is truly my only goal here! Take care and happy blogging!
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About the Author:
Marcy Amaro is the owner and creator of http://www.GlobalMarketingClassroom.com . She is a Christian, wife, mother of two, and a former English teacher. She has found a way to put her family back at the top of her priority list. You too can have the time and resources to focus on what’s really important and enjoy life once more! Find out how at http://www.StrategicMarketingMaven.com .
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