website maintenance

For a few months, I’ve been extremely frustrated about a little bug in the index.html page for my main website. (kyleclements.com)

the page worked just fine in FireFox 3.6 on my laptop. But for some reason, the image would fail to render on every other browser out there. I checked multiple computers, I loaded my website on smart phones, Wii’s, and Macs. I even tried it out on the Opera mini browser for my NDS.

No image.

What the hell is going on?

My machine was getting kinda crashy, so I wiped it clean and did a full re-install of everything.

I upgraded my OS to Ubuntu 11.04 (I was still on 9.04, so this was quite a jump), which features the brand new shiny FireFox 4 web browser.

And….the image would load. Damn!

I installed chromium.

The image wouldn’t load.

At this point, I was getting pretty angry, because it was looking more and more like it was a website coding error, not a browser error.

That means the mistake is my fault. Better look at the page source.

I was missing a single < / a > tag. I left one of my links open, and that was the source of all my problems.

Finally, after 4 months, my website will work right again! Time to upload this file and get to work.

I opened up Filezilla and tried to upload my fixed file, and it just erased my index.html page instead. I spent an hour tweaking setting, visiting my web host’s website and dealing with support, nothing. That 4kb file just didn’t want to upload.

Before calling it quites for the night, I figured, ‘lets try something new.’

I installed gFTP, hit upload, and 2 seconds later, my website was up and running.

By the end of it, I had a better faster lightweight browser and a better faster lightweight FTP client. And a functional website.

Published by

Kyle Clements

Kyle Clements is a Toronto-based artist and nerd. During his thesis at the Ontario College of Art and Design, Kyle began working on his Urban Landscapes series, a body of work that aims to capture the energy and excitement of life in the fast-paced urban environment. After graduating from OCAD in 2006, Kyle spent a year living in Asia to gather source material and experience in a different kind or urban environment. His work is vibrant and colourful. Whether painting the harsh Northern landscape, or capturing the overwhelming buzz of life in the city, his acrylic paintings hover between representation and abstraction.