A Little Troubleshooting

Last updated: August 17, 2018 at 1:14 am

 

Every now and then, for some inexplicable reason, things don’g work they way they were supposed to. That’s just a fact of life. And then, we’ve got to do some troubleshooting.

Here’s one example

The above screenshot shows three widgets in the footer area of the homepage: Calender, Recent Posts and Search.

I’ve looked at the footer area sidebar, and I don’t see any of these widgets there. So why are they appearing on the website?

Let’s take a look.

Let’s login to our Dashboard:

  1. www.hotelamazonasgy.com/wp-admin

2. Type in username and password.

3. Press enter.

Once inside the Dashboard, let’s click on Appearance >> Widgets.

This will show you all the widget spaces available.

As you can see, there 14 Widgets spaces on this theme. That’s what I like about it. However, I’ve opened everyone of these widget spaces and I don’t see those widgets that are showing on the page inside any of them.

I’ve especially taken a second and a third look at the two widget areas highlighted above – the footer sidebars – because the items are appearing in the footer of the page.

Now I’m pretty sure that those widgets are not placed but they items they carry are displaying on the page.

This is the kind of mysteries you will face from time to time as a web developer or in any IT work. They call it technological glitches and all kinds of names. Call it what you will, these strange phenomena do occur – and I don’t think it has anything to do with ghosts or otherworldly fascinations.

So when you’re faced with a problem like this one, what do you do? Let’s do some troubleshooting.

It’s possible that those items are not really live on the page, but they are stored in the browser’s cache. So the first approach is to refresh a few times.

OK. I’ve done this. It doesn’t work. I’ve refreshed the page about ten times. Still there.

Since that doesn’t work, the next step is to clear the browser’s cache.

Each browser and version of that browser will have a slightly different procedure for clearing the cache. For this reason, I won’t explaining to clear your browser’s cache, but I recommend that you google it.

Ok, So I’ve cleared the browser’s cache, and the items are still there! Refresh the page a few more times…yes, still there!

OK, here’s what I’ll do now. I’ll go back into my website’s WordPress Dashboard and I’ll click on Appearance >> Widgets.

This will open the widget area once more and I’ll drag a widget into those footer widget areas. Remember they are empty, so I figure if I drag something  in there, it should show up.

Let’s do this.

So I drag and drop the Pages widget into the Footer Sidebar and I’m going refresh the page and see what happens.

Well what do you know? It worked! All the other items are gone, and just pages are there now.

So I remove the pages widget and refresh the page, and once again those old items reappear. It looks like the theme executes a command to put those three items into the footer widget area if no other widget is in it.

So it looks mandatory that we put a widget in there. Don’t worry, I’ll find something really nice and appropriate to put in the footer widget area. For now, I’ll just leave the Pages Widget there.

So you’ve just got a little troubleshooting experience there.

Let’s move on to the next lesson: Inserting an Image Slider on the homepage.

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