This server business is really getting me down. I go to the trouble of redesigning the site -- weeks of trouble -- only to see half the page consistently fail to load. Or rather, randomly refuse to load. It doesn't seem to be a problem with the code. So what can be done about this? Other than fire Rogers.... Or Blogger. Or Rogers and Blogger, which believe me is coming...
Anyway, if any of you are having the same problem, it seems to work best if you wait about 20 seconds, then hit reload.
3/12/2007
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Have you tried increasing the PHP memory limit? I think that can cause pages to blank out instead of causing an error.
It can be changed at the beginning of a php script with
ini_set('memory_limit', '100M');
100M means 100MB...a big number like that usually fixes things if that's the problem.
It might not be a server side issue, or it might be a server side issue, but it might not be the server's fault.
I would check to see that the web pages have not been corrupted when they were transferred to the site. One way to do this is to retrieve them from the site after you have uploaded them and compare with originals, in terms of bytes.
I would also check on your use of characters. The character set you are using is not standard html. For most characters there is no problem. But for accented french characters for instance, you are not using the correct character set: the 1st e in Stephane Dion, the one with the accent, is showing up strangely in the source, as two consecutive characters, potentially unicode or windows wide char set. In Html, it should be represented by the five characters: é
http://www.natural-innovations.com/wa/doc-charset.html
Your new rotating headline is changing 3-4 times per second -- too fast for me.
As far as the cover page goes, the problem only occurs for rows 2 and 3, but not rows 1 and 4.
A common debugging technique is to rule things out, by replacing one thing at time, until you can narrow down the location of the problem further. So you could try removing one row at a time and seeing if/when the problem recurs. Then try changing each column in the offending row. Then try changing the contents of the offending cell.
The problem sees rather easy to reproduce, just close the browser, restart the browser and go back to the site.
With programming you need to be persistent.
I find if I stand on one leg, hold my breath and tilt my head to the left with my right arm up in the air at a 45 degree angle the page loads better. That my be specific to my particular ISP though.
I subscribe to your RSS feed and it works without a hitch.
Andrew, try ensuring that you have these options set in your php.ini file:
log_errors = 1
and
error_log = some_valid_logfile_path
There may be useful debugging information about your script that is being suppressed. Try enabling these, restarting PHP/Apache, and then checking the logfile after you see the blank-page problem.
See here for more info:
http://php.net/errorfunc
Also, you could enable verbose error reporting by adding this to the top of your script:
<?php error_reporting(E_ALL); ?>
(This should be done with a copy of your front page script that is hidden from random surfers. Otherwise it might expose details of your script to the public, which is not a good idea.)
See
http://php.net/error-reporting
Andrew,
You have 2 weasels gnawing on your ankles:
Rogers and Blogger.
Fire them both. Go with WordPress and a real service provider. Hell, go with Telus.
Do you want to hire someone? Me? Do you need your own server space, or the whole thing done?
I mean, I know it can be fun to mess with your own systems and site, but eventually there comes a time where it becomes a big hassle and you just want to write and have it on your site and not have to worry about it being presentable in this browser or that and whether the whole thing is breaking and whose fault it is.
Mark -- php.ini? Huh? Where would I find that? What script would I add error reporting to? What's a valid logfile path?