Earlier today, I wrote a post about how the low price of my blog on Entrecard was making me question the blog's worth. A couple of people commented on the post, but for some reason JS-Kit and CommentLuv didn't pick up the commenters' RSS feeds. Scared that the fault for that lay on my end, I decided to open Internet Explorer 8 and attempt to leave a comment using the URL of one of my other sites. I never got to the comment part, however, because I got the dreaded "operation aborted" error message every time I tried to open my home page.I got a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach as I thought, "Oh, great. Here we go again." How many times have I tweaked something on this web site, only to find out it works great in all browsers but Internet Explorer? Too many to count. The thing is this time I hadn't tweaked anything, which is what had me worried.
After sometime reading up on the problem on Firefox--by all means, the superior browser of the two--I discovered that Internet Explorer can't read certain scripts correctly. In particular, it has issues reading the scripts that are involved with Google Friend Connect or what used to be known as the Blogger Followers widget. According to the Blogger Known Issues site, Blogger has known about this since May and still hasn't come up with a solution. Lovely. The people in the Google forums suggest moving the widget further down your sidebar, removing it all together, or just using Firefox.
I'm not ready to remove the widget just yet. I'll be darned if I have to redesign this blog yet again for yet another Microsoft quirk. Instead I'm going to try moving the widget underneath the BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog widgets. If that doesn't work, all I can do for my readers is suggest using Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari. They're better browsers anyway.
UPDATE 7/17/09: I have moved the widget down, and now the blog is loading fine for me in Internet Explorer 8. I have also tested it in Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome, and, at least on my computer, it seems to be working fine. If any of you are still having problems, can you please leave a comment--assuming you can get the page to load long enough to do so--or send me an email at justbloggled@yahoo.com? Thanks. I'll scrap the widget if I have to, but I'm hoping the move was enough.
