Recently I shared a little trick showing you how to remove the “Provided by” text with MyBlogLog which is displayed automatically with the MyBlogLog code snippet.
Several readers emailed offering their thanks for the tip but letting me know it’s basically a useless tip to them as they no longer use MyBlogLog on their sites because it keeps their blogs from validating. I was a bit lost as I display MyBlogLog on my sidebar and it validates perfectly fine. When mentioning this to Katy she kindly pointed out the reason it validates on my blog is because I fixed the issue the day I added it to my sidebar. I had completely forgotten about the rant session that ensued that day. Poor Katy gets to listen to my endless complaints and rambling on a daily basis so remembered it well.
Back on point here.. I’m not a grand coder but it does bother the life out of me when my code doesn’t validate. I will often spend hours pouring over validation errors until I’m ready to scrap the whole project and start over again. A tad bit obsessive? Eh maybe or it could just be that if I can’t do it correctly I don’t want to do it at all.
With MyBlogLog though it took less than 2 minutes to make it validate XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I’m so not trying to be super coder of the world so transitional works perfectly fine for me. One day I may make the jump to strict but for now if it ain’t broke leave it the heck alone.
The fix jumped up and screamed at me!
The cause of my non-validating code was several unencoded ampersand symbols. The solution was a simple tweak to encode all of the ampersand symbols.
Change each & to &
Easy enough fix wouldn’t you say?
Tags: MyBlogLog, Validation, XHTML, Validation Tips, Webdesign, Blogging, Wordpress, Web Development
Yes, OCD, you just displayed it to the world.
Good tip though, I pointed out recently in another blog comment that it was easy enough to validate both MyBlogLog and Entrecard. Now you’ve proved the statement true. :D
While I’m not the most vigilant about validating, I think it’s sad that people can’t figure out something that simple, considering that the validators tell you exactly what the program with.