But, on to our problem! Sometimes it's simple, sometimes not.
- Your sidebar may be going to the bottom because your server is crazy due to being worked on by Blogger. Your sidebar doesn't begin at the top like it's supposed to.
- Wrong code or missing pieces of code sometimes cause this kind of jump or aberration.
- It is probable you'll have to get out of Compose mode and enter Html mode in order to see wrong code in the posts.
- It is possible you have posted too large a photo or too long a link. Change that and it might go back to the top of the page. Look for a misstated IMG code.
- Possibly your main column width and sidebar exceed allowable Content width or header width.
- Sometimes one of the "floats" in the template will get changed for some reason and be wrong. Investigate. Options are "left", "right", and "none".
- If you suspect it may be caused by something in a particular post, you could Save as Draft to remove it temporarily and see if it was the cause. Then you can Publish it again later to put it back in place.
- Also, sometimes I've found it to be caused by just getting some wrong or missing code in the template or in a recent post. You might have one tag or symbol too many or too few. If you've deleted some things, maybe you left one little piece of nonsense code behind that's confusing the template.
- Once it was caused in a friend's site by a -->, the closing tag for hiding a comment; it had no start tag, was just wrongly there!
Play Sherlock Holmes and test some changes without saving them until you use Preview and see that the change works and does no harm. It's hard, but I don't know any easy way.
To test posts one at a time, use the Permalink feature; if you click on the Post Title, your site will show only that one post. When you keep doing the blog like that, you MAY find a single post that pushes the sidebar down and that post will be the cause of your trouble. In other cases, of course, the trouble is coming from the sidebar and you just have to figure it out.
To hear all this put another way, go to Peter's post about it or Chuck's post.
Thanks for all the work you've put into this blog. It has been very helpful for me in solving my low sidebar problem.
ReplyDeleteFWIW the problems for me seemed to stem from having too many letters in an < em> tag. It didn't like "Monty Python's Life of Brian" which is only 28 chars but theere you go.
Thought you might be interested to know.
Kind regards
Matt Page
Thanks, Matt!
ReplyDeleteMy side bar was pushed to the bottom in IE but looked fine in Firefox. Thanks to this article I did a line by line inspection and found a /div tag in the second line of the Begin #main section. Removing this tag fixed the problem. Not an easy job.
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out the way
Thanks for all this help!Blogger should pay you— their Help?? pages are just plain confusing. Up and running in 5 minutes? Ya, right. I had a sinking sidebar caused by an over extended dash line.(my own creation) Looked fine in preview, sunk in publish. Took me awhile to figure it out and related it to the big photo issue.
ReplyDeleteWithout your Stickies, I would still be stuck!
Thanks for your words!
ReplyDeletenice. it was float tag problem. hooray! thanks.
ReplyDeleteNot a bad picture. Rather foxy, in fact. Well, you picked it, not me! No insult meant! We'll love you even if you get in a terrible car accident.
ReplyDeleteHelp me out! I've tried the things you suggest, and none of it works! I have three columns, not just two, but I can't even get two of them to line up next to each other on IE, everything looks peachy on Firefox and Safari, but I don't know what the problem is on IE - I made some of the changes you suggested, fiddled with the floats, and tried to get rid of extra tags, but all that did was mess up my font sizes - help! anyone!
ReplyDeletehttp://palmsout.blogspot.com
thanks, Haldan
Nice site bu tye way Ron.
ReplyDeleteI have a sinking main text; the sidebar is fine. But while I was working on that, I found that almost a month of posts (not sure how many) are just gone. I know I started the blog in early May, now there are only two May entries. Can they be recovered?
ReplyDeletehttp://knittinglikemad.blogspot.com/
Karen of TX: I counted more than a couple of May entries. I suspect you may have some cache problem or republishing problem. If you check all that and still it's not showing everything, name or describe some things that are not showing. Your source code makes it appear that your template is intact. Check your posts list on the dashboard and see if the May posts are visible. If so, certainly they are still there.
ReplyDeletehttp://20stickyposts.blogspot.com/2006/07/clear-cache.html
Hiya. This looks like a fab site and I do appear to have this problem (right hand side is pushed to bottom of blog). however I removed the last post and it just extended the margin for the previous one instead. I don't do anything other than type in words, so I don't know what is causing it. I also don't understand all the em tag things. How do I fix it?
ReplyDeletewww.belindanicholls.blogspot.com
Ron - thanks for the explanation. It appears to have worked (sort of). My side bar is up where it should be, but there is still a "step" to the margins. I'm not bothered though. Thanks for helping me out, very appreciated.
ReplyDeleteThanks Ron, I had a stray unclosed < div > in a post - you've saved my sanity :)
ReplyDeleteThat's good; sanity should be preserved, if it doesn't cost too much!
ReplyDeleteWOW, guys... I love internet! You can find help in a minute (after becoming mad).
ReplyDeleteI'm writing from Italy. I didn't find the solution in your text, Ron, but it gave me the start.
So, I have one "trick" more for you. My problem with the bloody sidebar moving on the bottom was posting by email with the "#end". I guess that not everyone has this problem. But, pay attention over there: on my server, #end is a command to put the sidebar on the bottom of the blog (if you want, it's a fast way to do it, without modify the template!).
Thank you guys, over there! :)
Sarah and Derek: I looked at your site and it looks fine in my IE6. Did you fix it already or do the electrons work better here in Texas? Let me know.
ReplyDeleteHi again,
ReplyDeleteI checked the site and on my end the sidebar is still at the bottom. Did you go to the "test" site? Not my original site? It's located at dsgranttest.blogspot.com (the title of the site should say "test ministy")
I'm working on a different site, which is where I am having some problems. I appreciate your help. Let me know if it still looks fine on your end? Thank you!
Yes, it does still look fine. And it the "test" that I am looking at. Is that right? How's the sidebar in your "real" or original blog? I don't mind this going on for a while, but if we need to, try emailing me at ratsouthern@gmail. com It will be easier, I think.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much Ron. You gave me the perfect solution to my problem - it was just a link that much too long. Once I removed the link the sidebar was normal again.
ReplyDeleteHi Ron
ReplyDeleteThanks for all the work you've done. I should have come here first before going nuts deleting entries that thought were casuing the sidebar sinking.
After coming here, and doing some detective work it was caused by a link that blogger seemed to think was ok when I published but was in fact looking as if the text was of infinate length.
So after destroying a lot of postings, one tiny tweak fixed everything. This problem only showed up in Micro$oft IE
I'll know next time
Thanks again
Thank you! I hope I found it finally. I hope it was this only one tag, a closing < slash a > tag of a link... It worked, when I clicked through the posts... Kind regards, Sybil
ReplyDeleteThank you! It was a tag!
ReplyDeletethis really is a great blog you have here. i have been browsing through trying and checking and can't seem to figure out what's wrong with mine. it kind of happened out of nowhere. i have even made the main wrapper wider to accommodate the wider side bar and posting area. so everything is wider and i left like 30 or 40 pixels to play with. i've tried putting it back to default, i've tried getting rid of some of my content - nothing works. i'm stumped. if you have any ideas, i'd greatly appreciate!
ReplyDeleteWhich of your blogs are you wrestling with?
ReplyDeleteJason: contact me by email. If you were talking about moods, the glitch seems to occur in the 3rd post, the "Prints of My Work Available". Perhaps the code for the image display is causing something.
ReplyDeleteMaybe you should email me. I don't see anything wrong--the sidebar is present and in the right position, so it might be your computer or I am just not imaginative enough to guess what your circumstances are.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great site, it is very helpful.
ReplyDeleteI have this problem as well and did some investigating. I found that when I went to my HTML, all of a sudden there is extra code that wasn't there before. Example -
Under #main-wrapper this is new:
display: inline; /* fix for doubling margin in IE */
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float
It's also under #sidebar-wrapper. I would think that is my problem, but don't want to mess up my site further by removing this code. What should I do?
Thanks!
Kashrut: Better leave the code be! It's similar to the code in other templates and I doubt there's any harm in it.
ReplyDeleteReally? ok, but it wasn't there before my sidebar messed up. I'll try a few other things, hopefully they will work. Thanks much!
ReplyDeleteYou never said HOW exactley something was messed up! Any detail you could give? Your site looks normal to m3 in IE and in Firefox.
ReplyDeleteIt was messed up by the sidebar being at the bottom. I think I have fixed it now. I had saved a copy the template a couple of weeks ago, so I re-uploaded that and it fixed the error, but of course did away with all of my widgets and coding. I am in the process of re-adding all of those again. Sometimes the sidebar goes back to the bottom, but I keep playing with the code in order to fix it. Thanks so much for your help!
ReplyDeleteSounds like you're on top of it even when the sidebar is not!
ReplyDeleteHi,
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like you have helped many people with the diving sidebar problem that I'm dealing with.
I don't know enough about tags to know what I may have done wrong. I tried saving my last few posts as drafts but that didn't seem to work. Any other suggestions for what I can check?
Jenny
http://jennysherwood.blogspot.com
My email address is in my sidebar if you need to tell me more. I can't easily see your problem by just looking, though sometimes one can tell that easily! If I were you, I'd experiment with changing the width of the sidebar or of the posts and see if the change makes it worse or better. You shouldn't save it right away, just Preview it and see. There's a button that will "undo" the changes if you refrain from saving them and then you can back out of the template until you can think of some other idea. I may try to tell more about it with some tests, so feel free to check back with me by email.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your response.
ReplyDeleteI found the culprit by changing the formatting so I could see one blog per page (see which blog had the sidebar on the bottom). I then reloaded a picture on one page and changed links to uploaded links on another and it worked.
I appreciate the help offered here and elsewhere!
Glad you found the problem. I went through and looked for any problem with the various widths and paddings, but that wasn't it!
ReplyDeleteyour advice totally helped me fix my layout! THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!!
ReplyDeleteAll is well (one hopes)!
ReplyDeleteohh my God thank you! thank you! am so not a friend of technplogy nor html or error codes and what not but with your help i finally got my blog back to normal i found out that myside bar ended up on the lower rightside because i had postes a youtube video that probably has a messed up html, any way once again thank you your mucho more helpful that that blogger help
ReplyDeleteVery good!
ReplyDelete