Anyone having trouble with sidebar on site?

[The Marquis]

Hello all,

Starting recently, when I go to

www.emeraldcitychronicles.com/index2.html

the sidebar on the left appears as just black, but is still clickable though I can't read any of the words. Is this just a problem with me? It appears this way to me on different computers.

Thanks,
Eric R

[AST Jenne/Cullodena Duff]

Its happening for Tate/Jibran and I as well.

Sent from my SPH-L710 using proboards

[Webmonkey]

Hmm.. Interesting. I'll look into it.

[Webmonkey]

Just to clarify, is it the side bar *on* that page you linked to that appears black or the sidebar on the message boards that leads to the vampire site?

[David Price]

On that page - Kevin and I chatted about this yesterday - seems to be a problem with it's rendering in Chrome. Kevin claims Safari works fine.

[Katie Hester]

It's happening with me and Todd as well. If it's a chrome issue, that would be why for us. We only use the chrome browser.

[Ariel Martin]

I was having the same problem the other night. Its the navigation bar on the left side of the emerald chronicles websight. The links work fine, but the words atached to the links never show up.

[Webmonkey]

How random. I've recreated the problem, so I'm going to republish the entire site from preproduction this afternoon. Hopefully Chrome will stop barfing and pick up whatever tags its missing. Thanks for the heads up folks and sorry for any inconvienience.

[AST Jenne/Cullodena Duff]

Semi annoyed that I had to download another browser but I will live. It's not life ending. But I'm such a hipster with my chrome and stuff I feel like people will knoooooooow.

[Barnaby Cuthbert]

The host is aware and looking into it, but yes, it's a Chrome issue, so short term solution is to go with another browser for now.

[Kevin K]

The image files themselves are corrupt somehow. If you open it directly in chrome, then it shows as transparent/blank:
emeraldcitychronicles.com/templates/Neon/img/navi/212875_n.gif

Same url in Safari works.

I download the image and load it, it's the same problem.

I open it in GIMP, save it again (no changes) it works.

I've started looking through the header in hex, I'm guessing that this is a generated file by the host, rather than something that you created? It's a little larger than it needs to be (compared to what gimp produces). My guess is that there's some bug in the way it's generated. Gif lets you define sub-images, and I bet it's in there somewhere.

Did you create these images yourself? With what tool? Either way, can you resave or otherwise recreate them?

-Kevin

[Kevin K]

Okay, i've looked at the header data, etc and that all looks fine. My guess at this point is an LZW compression bug or corruption of that data somehow that is giving a premature end. I don't feel like trolling through it all, but what I'd look for is a data block that either exceeds the end of file, or a data block that ends prior to the trailer code.

The latter would explain the behavior: technically, you don't need the trailer code at all, it just confirms what you should already know. I could see Chrome ignoring it in the interest of speed, whereas other apps would continue loading data if it's there.

All this comes from this definition:
www.matthewflickinger.com/lab/whatsinagif/bits_and_bytes.asp

[Webmonkey]

Sending this to the host. It isn't the issue they defined, so it's possible there is more than one problem. Thanks fellow nerds.

[Webmonkey]

Looks like it's solved. Can you Chromies confirm? (Clear cahches, refresh, etc)

[The Marquis]

Still looks the same to me after clearing cache.

[Katie Hester]

Nope, not fixed.

[Webmonkey]

Obnoxious. Back to the drawing board. Thanks for your patience with this. *frumblegrumblemonkey*