Yesterday, Andy pointed out – rightly – that my CSS wasn’t validating.

I checked the XHTML, and when it didn’t validate, for reasons other than invalid characters in the newsfeed, I decided to work on it first. One of the invalid characters was in one of the items under Listen/Read/Watch. When I logged in to fix it, I found that the link to the cg-amazon plugin was missing. So I deactivated and then reactivated the plugin. And therein hangs a tale.

I don’t know what I did, but somewhere in there all of the post text (what you’re reading here) got lost. No post displayed, either on the main page or the archives. Comments were OK. But there was no way to read what somebody had commented on.

I spent all morning trying to figure out why, with little luck. A post to the WordPress support forum yielded no clues either.

After lunch, I uploaded a brand new copy of WordPress to a new directory. Post showed up. I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why. I tried overlaying my “real” WP install with part of the test one to see if I could get the text to display. No luck.

Finally this evening I did what I should probably have done to begin with: I deleted the “real” WP install (after making a backup of course) and copied in the test one. Then I spent hours uploading and reactivating plugins and reapplying various customizations and hacks.

If you’re reading this, I was successful. But it wasn’t fun.

I’m glad it’s over.

And, yes, it validates, except for one CSS item in there to trick IE into floating the columns correctly.