How Is Your Blog Looking In Internet Explorer?

Image of IE not workingAre you viewing your blog ONLY using FireFox, Flock, Chrome or Safari?  Have you checked it lately using Internet Explorer?

NO?

Oh dear you may be in for a BIG SHOCK! If you are unlikely you may find that your blog isn’t viewable in Internet Explorer and totally locks up your web browser or isn’t displaying properly.

What’s Happening

I’ve spent considerable time over the past few weeks fixing blogs that aren’t loading properly in Internet Explorer.Image of axe

As an experience user it has caused me considerable anguish as I’ve battled to shut down Internet Explorer.  If I was a reader, with computers skills similar to my husband, there would be considerable swearing, while blaming the blogger for all the Worlds’ problems, followed with a high probability of the computer being destroyed with an axe!

90 % of  Internet Explorer issues we are seeing are being caused by users copying and pasting text directly from Word into their blog posts which becomes a MAJOR problem if they have lots of posts. Occasionally widgets from some websites are causing problems.

Please DON’T embed Google Presentations in your blog posts at the moment.  There is an issue with the Google Presentation embed code and Internet Explorer which is causing it to totally lock up the web browser.  This is happening for all blog platforms we have tested the embed code with!

The Solution

If you are using another web browser please do both me and your readers a favour!  Check your blog in Internet Explorer regularly especially when you use:

  1. Embed codes e.g. YouTube, VoiceThreads, Voki in blog posts
  2. Add new widgets to your sidebars

Making this part of your blogging routine means you’re able to immediately identify any issues and implement a fix.

FINAL THOUGHTS

While you mightn’t use Internet Explorer as your web browser, many new visitors to your site and existing readers will be!  50 % of people who visit The Edublogger view it using Internet Explorer.

Image by viZZZual.com under Creative Commons ShareAlike License.

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45 thoughts on “How Is Your Blog Looking In Internet Explorer?

  1. Since last Thursday, my blog has a diffrerent look when accessed with IE: old posts without text or very small characters (same in right side). I did not change anything. With Firefox, no problem.
    How can I correct the OLD things????
    Thanks!

  2. All Girls,
    If you are having a hard time finding summer reading books, I found one that I really like! It’s called Are You There God? It’s Me, Margret. It’s REALLY good! Anyway, just thought that I would post it. If you like that one, there are more in the series. Just ask me. I’d be glad to tell you!
    Naomi 🙂

    1. Hi Naomi,
      I was just curious as to the book that you recomended.
      What are the rest of the books in the series? And is it sutible for all ages?
      Thanks,
      dw09
      P.S. If that e-mail doesn’t work, then

  3. Why is my pic. all black?? Will someone who was in 5C write to me please! It’s Naomi! Thanks 🙂

  4. Hello Sue,
    I am a student at OLMC and my name is Sarah
    When I logged in, my Blog didn’t come up
    Is it that I am not looking hard enough or do you think that it might be lost?
    Thanks
    Sarah

    1. Hi Sarah, it is probably that you are a bit confused where to log in. That can happen. On your blog side bar you have a widget called a metawidget (http://dw09.edublogs.org/). There you will see login – if you click that link you can log into your blog. Alternatively you can log in directly by going to this URL http://dw09.edublogs.org/wp-admin/.

      On the Edublolgs homepage (http://edublogs.org/) you can also log in. What you need to do is complete the login details and then click the link to my dashboard.

      These manuals may help you as you get used to using your Edublogs blog.

  5. Thanks for making me feel like a loser for using IE…..kidding, but I am feeling proud that I have an education blog at all. It gets my kids thinking about topics that we don’t really have time to fully address in class since it’s not in “the curriculum.”

    Our school uses IE as do most of my students at home—students “caught” downloading another browser would be suspended from all computer use for 1 year. So regardless of my computer naivity I am stuck with IE for now.

    Our problem….which I have posted about on the support blog….is that some students are unable to comment. The blog itself looks fine—except that in school embedded video (mostly CNN and YouTube) does not show. We assume this is a firewall issue??? I can see the video on my computer logged in as a teacher.

    As for the comment issue—in the computer lab at school, some students are able to comment others aren’t. When they try to post a comment they get an error message page. They will “back” button it and try again and often it works on the 7th or 8th try, but for many they are always unsuccessful. We thought maybe this was because too many people were commenting at once—-but several students report this going on at home too. Several have resorted to writing comments on paper and handing them to me in class.

    The axe metaphor above is really how several of my students feel about blogging! If anyone could take a peek at my blog and tell me if they notice anything that I am doing wrong we would really appreciate it. I don’t copy and paste from word….but I’m sure there are other taboos I am committing.

    Thanks! Mary Lou (http://buell.edublogs.org)

    1. Hi Mary Lou, I can confess I also use IE if that helps. I have three web browser running on my computer at one time – yes I probably need to get out more.

      Well the YouTube is either a case of it being blocked by your firewall or the code being broken when you add it. However if you can see it in IE on your computer sounds like the firewall.

      Commenting problem is probably what I’ve discussed in my latest post so you might want to check out the comments people have written to stop comments being lost.

      Your blog is looking excellent in IE and the videos are working fine. Can’t see any obvious issues with it.

  6. Hi Sue

    I can not for the life of me work out why when viewing my blog in Internet Explorer it becomes distorted as you scroll down the page – the post headings are a large font and I have not copied and pasted using word – please advise me:)

    1. Jeanette, there is definitely extra HTML code in your blog posts and that is what is effecting how it is displaying in Internet Explorer. If you click on the HTML tab you will immediately see text that looks like this – look at this screenshot.

      This is HTML code that is being brought in from where you are writing your posts. Copy & pasting from Word will do this. But so will any other Word Processing application even copying from emails.

      To correct the problem you need to follow the instructions in my post Why You Shouldn’t Write Your Posts Using Word – copy the text from your post into NotePad, then click on HTML tab and make sure all HTML code has been deleted and then copy/paste back into the Visual Tab. If you do that for every post on the front page you will find that fixes the problem there (but may be a problem when people go to older posts).

  7. Although I believe that you know about this – on the off chance that some of you don’t know – wordpress does have a mechanism to solve this problem.

    One can paste “microsoft word” text into wordpress posts and pages as follows:

    1. Click on the show/hide kitchen sink toggle.

    2. A new row of toggles will appear. One of them will allow you to paste word text into the post.

    It works very well.

    1. Trouble is that the paste from “MS Word” button doesn’t strip out all the extra code. If you check in WordPress.com forum they even say that they recommend NotePad over using the button = crazy.

  8. Sue, one site that’s a big help for my clients is http://browsershots.org It allows you to compare your site and how its viewed in a number of browsers, resolutions, color depths, and OSes. It also takes into account javascript, Flash, and Java. It’s a big help when it comes to problems like this.

    1. Yes I like using Browershots myself. But since I normally have 3 web browsers running at the same time I find it easy to quickly check. Looks like the issue with Google Presentations may be also linked to which version of IE you are using and perhaps security settings.

  9. Thank you, thank you…I didn’t know any of this.
    This week parts of my blog vanished on Internet Explorer but were available on Firefox. ..pictures mostly.
    So if I embed some YouTube video and look at my blog on Internet Explorer and it’s messed up, what should I do?
    I’ve been thinking for a while that I should get out of using Internet Explorer but just didn’t do it. I moved all my favorites over from Internet Explorer to Firefox. You’ve convinced me.
    If I want to create blog posts and have them, on deck, so to speak, what’s the best way to do that? Should I just make them in blogger and then publish them when I need to? Or should I do something else?

    1. Hi Nancy, what happens is the embed code is breaking when it is being inserted which is causing the problem. Not sure this would happen when you embed into blogspot. But I can tell you that embedding a Google Presentation will prevent your blog from loading in Internet Explorer.

      You are always safer to write your posts within the blog dashboard. That way you know that you won’t have trouble with bad code being added that causes problems.

  10. Hi Sue

    Your posts always contain useful advice. I am going to check my blog out with IE and see how it loads up. I usually write my posts straight onto my blog so hopefully there aren’t any pasting issues. I also use Mozilla Firefox and I think it seems to be ok. As for checking Youtube videos embedded into my blog, I never check them so maybe I should from now on.

    Many thanks for the useful tips!

    Janet B

    1. Hi Janet, glad you find my advice helpful. I haven’t seen any issues with YouTube code being broken lately so maybe that issues has been fixed. At the moment it is Google Presentation causing much of the problems and copying/pasting from Word.

      I just included the example of YouTube so people understood what I meant when I said embed code. Maybe bad choice of words by me.

  11. Yet another reason to abandon IE in favor of Firefox, or Chrome, or some other alternative. I can’t tell you the last time I opened up IE and don’t know when the next time will be.
    Kevin Hodgson

    1. Agreed Kevin, but we have to accept that many of the educators that we are trying to engage with using web technologies are still using Internet Explorer. So if we don’t make our posts IE friendly we are impacting on our chances of engaging them.

  12. My wife wondered why I have four different browsers on my computer, until I showed her the different ways that a single post can look. She was quite surprised to discover that they all don’t work the same!

    When I was looking for a theme to start my blog with, I made sure that it would work “properly” in different browsers. I knew some of my friends would become regular readers, and among them there are Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox, and Chrome users. I want to please everybody!

    Great piece of advice, of utmost importance to everyone who is not already aware of it. I didn’t know about checking after inserting videos, thanks for the tips!

    1. Hi Matthew, glad my advice helped. It is part of my standard routine after writing a post – check look in IE and make sure looking good in Google Reader. I really also be checking how they are going in Bloglines also (bad me!).

  13. You mean some people are still using IE?? The suckiest browser in the history of browsers which proves that quasi-monopolies = lousy products… THAT IE??

    Me, I just tell everybody to use FF3. 😛

    1. Agree I also prefer to use only FireFox, oh and Flock for Edublogs support emails and then off course IE for sorting out problems. All I need is Chrome running and I won’t know which web browser to use for which task.

      But I also work for TAFE here and many of the applications for student management only work in IE. Great!

  14. Sue:

    Thanks for this notification. I’ll go back and try and figure out why, but my blog is now locking up in IE7 (and it never did last year).

    I don’t compose in Word and I don’t use Google presentation, so not sure what the issue is. I noticed that none of my widgets had loaded in the side bar, so I’ll check them first.

    Things still look fine in Firefox, but the majority of my students (and the world) still uses IE, so Edublogs does need to figure out what is going on. Now that I am a paying member, I feel I can complain! 🙂

    1. Hi Britt, I checked your blog when I saw the email come through and it was loading perfectly so unless you have changed a widget it has to relate to something you embedded in a post last year. If you can tell me approximately which month I’m more than happy to check it for you.

      PS would have checked whether you were a paying member or not 🙂 – I don’t differentiate between users.

      Tried to fix the Google Presentations issue but unfortunately it is their code and Internet Explorer so one of those two organizations need to address it.

  15. Kia ora Sue!

    Yup. Been there, done that. I may have mentioned this once before – I forget when or where, but it was on one of your blogs.

    In the bad ol’ days of Netscape, and before Mozilla got large, I was building web pages galore. I used a lot of what was called dynamic html. They were java scripts and other gizmos that did things with text. I also used a lot of effects with images including animations. My main tools for all this were ImageReady (which is PhotoShop) and DreamWeaver (which is a sophisticated html editor) and Flash.

    Because a lot of this was experimental, and I was trying a lot of things out, I’d test what I’d built on as many different versions of IE and Netscape as possible. That was an illuminating experience. It alerted me to the possibility that different browsers (and their different versions) handled formatting and effects differently. Some just did not display the things at all. Some displayed the items with some modification to what was originally inteded, etc. Some caused the computer to ‘hang’, or the page to ‘hang’. Sigh

    What I also discovered was that the early versions of IE tended to be quite intelligent and interpreted a lot of things that were not coded to standard browser specifications. The upshot of it was that I found that if it worked on Netscape (I think around version 3) it would work on most browsers. Mozilla Firefox is a browser that follows specifications quite rigourously and is in some ways similar to Netscape in this respect – I believe it is based on a very similar design.

    But the new versions of IE tend to adhere to specifications, but as always, they’re MS specs and don’t necessarily match the international specs. Ahem! Some would say they’re not following specifications at all.

    As a result of my past, traumatic experiences, I am reluctant to try many wizzy things when I write blog posts. I also check my posts from time to time on Chrome, Firefox (versions), IE (versions) and (also Apple Macs!).

    The Apple Macs are another set of fish kettles. I won’t go there. 🙂

    Catchya later
    from Middle-earth

    1. Hi Ken – yes I think it was the post on using Word to write posts. Nothing wrong with the flashy stuff provided you just quickly test it to make sure not causing problems. And let’s be honest a little embed every now and then does grab a readers attention while also catering to the differing needs of learners.

  16. Hi, and now for something completely different. Can I have two different blogs with edublog? I’ve tried to start a second but it isn’t letting me.

    Thanks for your help.

    jim

    1. Not sure what you mean by “isn’t letting you.” If this is still an issue for you, why not drop by the support forums and ask there. Be sure to leave all the details that you can. The “If seeking help…” checklist is a great help when it comes to that.

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