dibs

charle97:
I don’t really have any visitors yet: I just started the blog and have been trying it out for a few days, and I haven’t even told anyone about it or advertised it at all. So I don’t have a track record of visitors yet.

LiverpoolLad + moshu:
I just looked at my “syle.css” file, and the “container” is 700 px wide, broken down to 450px for the main content column, 200px for the sidebar, and I guess 50px for margins and spacing, etc. It seems easy enough to maybe decrease the existing sidebar to 150px wide, then duplicate it on the other side, which would give me 450+150+150+50 = 800 pixels total, plus maybe another 50 for more margins — so at most, 850 pixels. Isn’t that narrow enough for 99% of screens these days? I’m just using an average/small laptop and it’s 1280 pixels wide. It seems that only little tiny subnotebooks or maybe antique desktops would have anything smaller than 800 pixels. Is there a way to find out the percentages of users have what-sized screens?

chradil:
OK, per your suggestion, I have emailed you the CSS file. Don’t spend more than a couple minutes altering it and sending it back to me — I feel guilty putting you to trouble. Thanks!

jimatwork: “I created a php file called leftbar.php and put in it what I wanted. I just copied the sidebar.php file and edited it.“
That’s how easy I hoped it would be. I think the hard part will be figuring out which of the other files to alter so that they all “recognize” the new column. I’ll see what chradil recommends, too. But…

LiverpoolLad: “…basically copy the sidebar php and rename it, then subtract some pixels from the main content and the other sidebar to make up another.“
Is it really necessary to subtract pixels from the other columns, or can I simply have a wider blog overall — keep the same pixels in the existing columns, and have additional pixels for the new column. Isn’t that possible?

moshu: “It is NOT simpler to add a third column. It means re-designing the theme: there is no easy way. Sorry.”
So far, from what’s I’ve seen here, it does seem simpler to add a third column than starting all over with a new theme and customizing it; I went to a lot of trouble to change the masthead and dividers to my liking, and re-doing all that seems harder than adding a new column to “FallingLeaves.” I guess I’ll have to wait and see!

Thanks everyone.

miklb: “your missing a semicolon after the closing parenthesis in the permalink tag”

Yes, that seems to have done the trick! I tried adding the semicolon, and I can’t reproduce the error anymore.

Thank you miklb; I knew that the error was something minor — but I never imagined it would be a single missing character!

Hmmm, mysteriously, my final problem has fixed itself! Not sure how I did it, but now, after about half an hour, the Dashboard suddenly has all its graphics back, as does my blog. And I don’t remember doing anything to cause this to happen! Strange.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Thanks for the suggestion, HandySolo, but I won’t need it, since the problem is now fixed after all. And thanks to you, BPartch, for the useful but self-evident suggestion. I had always thought that the WordPress files HAD to be in a directory called “wordpress,” but apparently not, since now mine are just scattered at the top-level domain. I never knew that was permissible. Otherwise, i would have already tried it!

Final result: problem solved. Ahhhhhhhhh.

Here’s what I’m talking about:

You know how your own Dashboard is supposed to look? With a certain amount of graphics and layout, etc.? Well, I took a screenshot of how my Dashboard looks, to show you how it is nothing but text. Here’s the link to the screenshot:

https://www.dibsblog.com/screenshot.jpeg

How can I fix this?

Move all the files and folders out of the /wordpress/ folder and up one level to the root of your server.

Ah, ignore my “How?” question — I figured it out. I moved the files and folders up one level, and solved the immediate problem. Thank you!

However, I still have the other major problem — all the graphics and layout still don’t appear, either in the Dashboard or the blog itself. Only text. The functions all now work (I can change the Options at last), but some little detail has gone awry concerning some file that controls the “look” of the pages. Any suggestions?

Move all the files and folders out of the /wordpress/ folder and up one level to the root of your server.

How?

Decent hosts usually offer tools (stats) to see the traffic on your site.
You can also google for different site stats, counter, hit etc. tools.

Yes, but is there some kind of WordPress “plugin” or sidebar-thingie that will allow me to get a visitor total? Or will I have to rely on my “host” to provide the info? And if I find something via Google, how do I know it will work on WordPress?

Otto42:

Woohoo!! Great suggestion, even if it was a guess! I tried what you said — made the ftp upload preference be set to “Always as Text,” and then re-upload various files that seemed like they might be causing the problems. And, little, by little — it worked!

I took me a while to identify which files needed to be re-uploaded, but after each correct one — like hitting a jackpot — one of the little lines of visible code would disappear when I refreshed the blog page. Now — the mysterious text is all gone! Thank you, Otto42.

However, I now have a follow-up question: ALL of my WordPress files and folders were uploaded with the “incorrect” ftp upload preferences. So that means that perhaps there are other files as well that ware “mapped” erroneously as Binhex or whatever, instead of “text.” Should I re-upload everything, in order to “correct” this problem, even though it doesn’t seem to adversely affect the blog?

My gut feeling on this is: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I’ll leave the files as is, unless I discover some other problem with the blog. But I don’t want to actively cause a problem by trying to “fix” something that doesn’t require fixing.

So: this issue is solved. Thanks everyone!

And a notice to future WordPress users who have this problem: It can be fixed by ftp-ing the files as “text,” instead of “Binhex.”

I notice that the letters “BIN” occur repeatedly in the mysterious text, so I’m guessing the problem might have something to do with BinHex mapping when uploading files. I just checked my ftp program, and these are the settings it is currently at:

Upload file options:

X Use Internet Config’s File Mappings (“Intelligent”).
Always as MacBinary.
Always as Binhex 4.0.
Always as Binary.
Always as Text.

(The “X” indicates that the first option out of these five is the one that is selected.)

Also checked, lower down, is the option

X Don’t add “.bin” extension for MacBinary uploads.

Are these settings correct? Or are they the source of the problem? And if so, what are the proper settings?

There might be something wrong with that “mysterious” server.

No, I’ve communicated with tech support for the server, and there’s nothing wrong with it at that end — dozens of WordPress blogs are hosted on the same server, and they all function fine.

There might be something wrong with the editor if you opened any file before uploading.

The editor I used is Apple’s “Textedit,” and it has the “Encoding” option set to “Save as UTF-8,” which is what it’s supposed to be.

There might be something wrong with your FTP settings.

I checked that too, and made sure that the ftp program doesn’t unncessarily add “.bin” to the end of every WordPress file (as some ftp programs do).

[A sidenote: it doesn’t really make sense to “test” your install on a server and then move to another server – usually the server settings differ, so you’ll have to start over…]

Actually, I will simply be moving the blog to a different domain on the same server, and was told by the Host that I wouldn’t have to start over at all — they could transfer everything to a new directory with a couple of keystrokes, with no change to any file.

Well my best guess is that the text isn’t encoded correctly.

That’s what I thought, but as far as I can decipher, everything is properly encoded at UTF-8.

Have you tried reuploading the theme via FTP?

Well, if I re-upload, won’t I then have to start from scratch? What I’m trying to avoid is re-uploading everything, just to fix what is probably a very simple problem.

What changes (if any) have you made to the theme, and how?

The only changes I made were to replace the “masthead” jpg — i.e. I downloaded the theme’s jpg, altered it a little in Photoshop, saved it as the exact same file name, and re-uploaded it. But that’s not the problem — the “visible code text” issue existed even before I changed the jpg.

Here — this might help:
When I go to “View Source” (in Safari) for the page in question, I see this (cut and pasted in exactly):

index.php_?5]4?5]4mBIN???k index.php1?xTx?xTxmBIN??*?
header.php??v?l?v?lmBIN????<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “https://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”&gt;
<html xmlns=”https://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”&gt;

<head profile=”https://gmpg.org/xfn/11″&gt;
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

<title>{NAME OF BLOG}</title>

…Then, later, there is this:

sidebar.php??v?l??aamBIN????<!– begin sidebar –>
<div id=”sidebar”>

So, I can see that there is extraneous text before the actual code that controls the page. But I can’t figure out which file contains that text, for me to get to it and delete it. I admit ignorance to how these “index” files seem to get generated dynamically, or where they “reside,” or whatever.

Still can’t figure out this simple problem.

mylagoon:
I know that a link would be helpful, but unfortunately I can’t give the link, as the site it is on is “not ready for primetime.” (It is situated on a subdirectory of someone else’s site which he keeps to make certain business documents available internally for a company, and he asked me to not post links to it, since it is not for public consumption.) My blog is only there at the moment so I can try it out as a “test run.” Later, I will move the blog to its own domain, after I have worked out the kinks.

But you don’t really need the link — my description sums it up pretty well. The site itself functions perfectly, so the strange text doesn’t “affect my site” at all, except to make it have crazy text on it.

Sorry to be obtuse about the link, but I promised I wouldn’t give it out.