If anybody noticed any hiccups here at Fairhand today (Sunday) let me explain…

I wrote a very long post. It broke my blog. I spent hours and hours looking at the html, rewriting things, cutting, pasting, editing, re-editing. Every time, it broke my blog.

Eventually I looked at the page source instead of my html source.

There I found the stray code that was breaking things.

I have a plugin, called Lightbox. That is the thing that puts up the nice image display when you click on the thumbnails. (Oh, OK, well I think it’s nice – agreed you may hate the twiddly bits…) To make the Lightbox work, I have to add a rel tag to my html anchors. If I add rel=lightbox to the anchor, each image will display individually. Fine. But I can extend that rel tag by adding between square brackets any name that I choose to – then all images tagged with that name will display in the Lightbox using the Next/Previous navigation as a collection or… gallery. Quite often I name my collections according to the post that they are in, so that only the one post’s images display together. Like maybe I’ll use rel=lightbox[Nell] to show a collection of photos of Nell from one or more posts in a page or rel=lightbox[Sunday] to show only today’s images together. Or maybe I’ll choose to use rel=lightbox and put the word gallery between the square brackets… I frequently do, with the intention that all posts on the page, having that in the rel tags, will display their images together.

…but see how I didn’t actually demonstrate that usage?

That is because WordPress now treats the occurrence of that word, gallery between square brackets, as a keyword – intended to trigger the new gallery feature within WordPress.

You may take my word for it that if you are using the keyword inside an anchor for Lightbox, you will manage to fully break your post as WordPress swings into action to deploy its new Gallery feature code.

Today’s post is fixed (rel=lightbox[earth]) and I can avoid breaking things in future now that I am aware… but… what about all my old posts with the gallery keyword in them? They must all now be broken and anybody coming to them via a search engine or a bookmark is going to see an awful mess.

Last Modified : April 27th, 2008 Filed under : About Navigate : Previous post / Next post