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Adsensing and bugsensing

Submitted by Karthik on 13 May, 2005 - 21:38

Well, added the adsense blocks (there are 3 of them) on the left and right. While most people informed me that installing it was a pain, I found it rather straightforward - set the block filter to PHP, added code and voila!

The colour palette for the blocks are the same as for the nuke ancestor of this site. Looks pretty.. striking :)

The reason why there are three of them is because there are different ones for different sections of the site. One (on the left) for the frontpage and a few manually areas; another (also on the left) for all nodetypes except blogs; the third (on the right) displayed only during blogs. I tried to combine the first two, but the block specifiers don't accept.. OR conditions. It does AND and NOT, but ... not OR. The NOT section also says that all blogs can be blocked via blogs/*, but that just blocks the blog listing rather than individual nodes.. which is pointless.

Bugs - First one was some weird behaviour due to the adsense blocks that caused the sidebars to just bloat in width unecessarily. I then found that the site was completely breaking down in IE. After about 10 minutes of pointless banging-of-head-on-wall, I just replaced the CSS file with my local copy (which is identical).. and .. voila! (that's twice :P) And no, this wasn't a caching issue.

While I was tracking this, I noticed that FF alone had a rather wide right sidebar. This was due to a lengthy topic in the "New Forum Topics" block - "www.gmail-is-too-creepy.com" (which is essentially one continuous word). While IE and Opera wrapped this word at an appropriate place, FF took the liberty of just widening the entire DIV and breaking the layout. Setting overflow:hiddenhad no effect in Opera or IE (as there was .. no overflow). But in FF, the right sidebar was fixed, but now the left sidebar was looking jaundiced. So I've just given up on this issue as essentially, this will occur only when really long single word subjects are used, which is rather seldom..

However, the most annoying aspect of the day was on my local copy of Drupal - accessing the site as an anonymous user, presented you with a blank white page. I cleared the cache table, after which I was able to access the page once after which I was presented with a blank page once again (after about 40 seconds of waiting). During these 40 seconds, the MySQL service on the server was at 99% CPU usage, for reasons unknown :/

Fixing this involved accessing the admin page directly which wasn't cached, logging in and turning page caching off. But I'm still in the dark at the moment as to why exactly this happened..

Lastly, two more bugs:

-Node teasers don't automagically close open tags
-The interview CSS file breaks in IE :/

Not a very satisfying day..
-K