I hope I don’t have a day like yesterday again for a long time. I still can’t believe the number of totally unconnected things that went wrong — from spilling my coffee all over my pants to the server at work losing 1/2 its brains. At 10:30 last night, while finishing the last of the clean-up, all I could think was, “Please don’t throw anything else at me!”

I haven’t come up with a solution. I briefly contemplated changing all of the gifs to Flash movies. But the mommy logo would be tough to turn into Flash because of the transparent background. The weather gif is loaded via a php call and an hour of messing around with various calls to various objects couldn’t get it to load right as a .swf vs .gif. Probably because I don’t really know what I’m doing.

While banging my head against the keyboard in frustration, I decided to do one more search for the answer and brought up Yahoo. There was a Flash ad running, and when I put my cursor into the text box to type in my search criteria, my little insertion point flashed like a neon light in Times Square.

I decided I can live with it flashing away on mommymonster.com. There aren’t that many text entry opportunities, nobody else comes here anyway, and I have a short attention span. And it only happens with IE. Mozilla and Opera are handling the insertion point OK without the flashes. Of course, the menus don’t work as well in those…

arrrrrgggggghhhhhh it’s endless

Reasoning that at one time I was a fairly competent programmer and should be able to troubleshoot a little problem like a flashing cursor, I set about having a go at figuring out what was causing the problem.

After tearing a page apart piece by piece until the problem stopped, I came up with the following answer: It happens when a page has been loaded into an iframe on a main page that has an animated graphic.

Curses!

I now go in search of a solution. I might almost be willing to give up my happy little mommy monster logo. But the weather graphic in the upper left corner won’t make nearly as much sense if it isn’t animated.

I suppose the other choice would be to give up iframes. But, darnit, it works well.

So… put your cursor into any text entry box on mommymonster.com — the search box, say, or the guestbook. And the cursor will start to pulse wildly. It’s making me seasick as I write this.

So, what’s going on? I’m pretty sure that it has something to do with DHTML Menu Builder because the pages don’t have the same problem when I load them outside of the iframe. But why the iframe problem, and how do I fix it?

The mysteries of life…

What a concept…

This is where it all happens.

At work I’m a clean-desk person. Here I’m a bit more of a slob… But I know where everything is. I do. Really.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.