Developer’s Diaries – It’s (not) good to refresh
A developer has his days where he sets tough targets and miletones to deliver. Tonight was such a night for me. I had windows open all over, working on multiple things simultaneously. I did a small update to one of my sites in the header, tested fine, upload to production. Only to find out all of a sudden, the page magically refreshes everytime I click on the search textbox field!
I know what you’re thinking. OnClick events. I tried to check them all, even though I did not made any modifications there. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them. I revised all the header parameters. No refresh or anything as that. Is my site hacked or something? No. Problem replicated in development local machine. I have a load of javascript files for jQuery and autocompletion, so I thought to my self, maybe a new version of Firefox & Chrome is creating this sort of problems with an old jQuery library, as IE this time was on the safe side!. Googling for similar instances, no results!
I placed another test textbox, it absorbs the same behavior. Any other page on the site does not have this problem but the main page. Something must be wrong. I had to make the bad move. I started trimming the code to pieces. First, remove all HEAD section. Problem remains. Remove footer, all javascript code, remove the whole body. Problem only went when I replaced the whole page with single input box inside BODY tag. Now, start revirsing and building up the site. Once I added the header section, problem comes again! I only replaced the image for God’s sake!
<span><a href=”index.php” ><img src=”logo.gif”/></a></span>
Darn it! I only forgot to close the <a> tag, and the text boxes turned into monster linking creatures! Wonder why only the textboxes absorbed the links though. Hahh… night wasted, but at least I will sleep with peace of mind.
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Comments
You’ll minimize these kind of errors if you were using an editor. Were you using one or simple programming the old fashion way ;)
maryam: To answer your question. I once had an interview by two europeans at a mobile operator company in Kuwait (U take the guess), and they were asking lots of questions, so far impressed, and then they asked, which tool do you use for development (expecting JDeveloper, Visual Studio and stuff). I proudly smiled back and said “NOTEPAD!” :)
Guess what? I got hired. Something I hated about tools is how they miss up my code rather than help. I do use now Notepad++, and TextMate (reason I got the Mac actually)
Still, just plain editors only. Developers, what can you do
happens all the time!! you’re not alone