Helping Fellow Bloggers

I was doing my usual browsing  of various forums I belong to today, though this one in question is the PHPFreaks.com forum. People post various PHP related issues asking for advice and help with code they have written for various tasks and eventually they get answered.

One post caught my eye today; the post was from a person with the username of blogpaul. He was looking for help with some code that was related to his blog and he was having a hard time trying to fix it.  There were various replies to his post which were not the nicest and they did not manage to help him only to make him more frustrated.

Then I came along and read over what he had posted. Some of his issues gave good insight into what the possible problem was and how he should go on solving it. One main thing that triggered in my head was ‘sidebars are showing at the very bottom of the page’. I’ve had similar issues with doing layouts where my right column would be pushed down below my main content section.

I contacted Paul via his blog and told him what might have happened. He instantly replied to me via email and asked me if I was available. I added him to my MSN Messenger contacts and asked him if he was still having troubles. He was.

I asked him some simple questions like: ‘Did you add any new plugins?’ and ‘Did you change anything recently?’. His reply was that he’s been playing around with a Wordpress theme and after a modification his right column moved.

I grabbed one of my favorite FireFox plugins (Web Developer 1.1.3) and switched on the ‘Display Div Order’ option under the Miscellaneous menu.  This allows the outlining of all DIV tags within a website.  This is what I thought might be the issue; one of the DIV tags within Paul’s main page was not sitting in its right spot. In fact, he was missing a closing </DIV> tag altogether so his right column sidebar was being loaded within the main-content’s element.

Looking quickly over the Wordpress code he sent me I was able to confirm my suspicion, indeed it was missing a closing </DIV> tag and I was able to tell him where to put the proper one to fix his page.

Paul was grateful for my assistance and I was happy I could help out fellow blogger. I do enjoy helping people (like Paul) with their websites (it’s one of my main reasons for visiting PHPFreaks.com/forums) because it allows me to meet more people and work on my problem solving skills while sharpening my coding knowledge.

Thanks goes to Paul for allowing me to help him and special thanks for the thanks he has given to me on his blog: Chicks Dig Tyler Ingram.