Traveling Thoughts

Ok, I live in the US and I’ve never been out of the country, so, this is something I have no experience in. However, it is something that people have been searching for and it’s been landing them on my diabetes blog on an entry about me smuggling candy at halloween time when I was a little kid.

So, there’s the typical things (or at least the things I think of as typical) to smuggle in. People. Fruits. Drugs. Cuban Cigars. Weapons. Those are the typical things I think about being smuggled into the US. Not meat. I mean, meat, is there really meat in other countries that we can’t get here. Or perhaps it’s because of the meats we have here the same meat from another country tastes better? But then, I was reading, and some of the meat people are trying to smuggle in (to the UK mind you, I couldn’t find much of anything about the US) is coming from countries whose animals have hand and foot disease. Why would anyone smuggle meat from those countries?

Not that anyone’s going to tell me why they’d smuggle meat into the US, but I thought that it was an interesting search term that popped up.

The one thing that I can always count on breaking when I do a redesign of my diabetes/cycling blog ridetoremedy.com is my google map that shows all the Tour de Cures that I’ve ridden in.

I redesigned my blog sometime this summer, June I think it was, and my map hasn’t worked since. Well, it worked, kindof, the map showed up and white squares showed up where the markers should’ve been. I couldn’t figure out what the heck had happened because I transfered all the code from the first layout to the next.

It pissed me off that it wasn’t working, but I couldn’t figure out what the problem was. The code worked outside of the layout but not in it. I stripped everything down and still couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working.

Today, I thought, well maybe it’s another piece of javascript that’s interfering. And so I started taking all that out. The map worked when I removed one piece. So, I made it so that that particular piece of code wouldn’t show up on my map page. Do you think it worked, no, it didn’t.

I couldn’t figure out why, and then upon closer inspection, I discovered that when I had chopped out that piece of javascript, I also took my stylesheet with it. The problem with my map, for all these months, was a little piece of code in my stylesheet. The code in my stylesheet for my images, the code that put nice little borders on my images, it was causing the markers to appear as white boxes.

In the future, when I do site upgrades, and my map breaks, I’m gonna have to remember that the problem could be in my stylesheet.