The Tinypic Annoyance: FIXED!

Technorati tags: Blog Template, Tinypic, Annoying Error Banner, Script Fixing

Visitors to this blog may have noticed this annoyance whenever the page starts loading. Heck, you must be blind to NOT notice. Apparently, this has been the case since September 2010, as Walski found out when he finally got down to fixing it last night.

Well, the problem’s been fixed. Finally. And the fix was just a matter of commenting out one stupid line in the blog template script. The root of the problem? A link to the image hosting service, Tinypic.

And that’s the risk of using a highly customized template downloaded from blog template websites, especially if editing HTML scripts isn’t something you’re comfortable with. In fact, Walski had no idea the link was even there to begin with. Until he got down to tracing the problem, and resolving it once and for all.

So, sorry for the possible irritation this might have caused, but the problem is now history… 
(root of the problem, if you’re interested, and more, in the full post)

Since Walski had some time last night, he decided to trace the problem, which he began noticing some months back, but didn’t really bother to do anything about, since the Tinypic error banner does go away once the page loads completely. However, he did notice that page loads were taking ages, but thought that it was either a slow Internet connection or something else in the template causing the delay.

Then, Antares left a comment asking what the heck was going on (in not so many words), and that the Tinypic thing was obstructing his view to the post text. This was about a couple of months ago, at the height of Walski being busy, so nothing was done about it.

And then Masterwordsmith called Walski a couple of weeks ago to “alert” him to the problem. Still, Walski procrastinated. Until last night.

Apparently, sometime last September, Tinypic decided to not accept non-US image uploads anymore (via BloggerzBible). And what probably happened is that the image to which a link was present in the template script was no longer accessible (probably deleted). Which then gave rise to the image not being found, hence the annoying display.

Finding the exact problem, once Walski knew the cause, was real easy – just a matter of doing a text-search for “tinypic” within the template script. The root of the problem? One line in the script that calls up the supposed background image:

All Walski had to do was comment out that line – problem solved! Bonus: the page seems like it loads faster now.

The moral of the story: small things can create big problems, or at the very least, major annoyances….

So, thanks for bearing with the Tinypic annoyance for the last 6 months. Incidentally, if you do find something amiss with the blog, all it takes is to leave a comment, and Walski will get it fixed. Eventually….