Stylesheet templates behaving strangely

#1 / Mar 23, 2011 11:22am

Will Smith
76 posts

Hi all,

When I went to our site this morning, I noticed that the header and footer were displaying screwy, which totally butchered the look of our entire site (http://chicago.urbanturf.com). Upon investigating, I found that the corresponding stylesheet template was not loading in the web browser. I then went into the EE control panel expecting to see that the template had somehow been deleted. But no, it was there. I displayed and “Updated and Finished” the file to refresh it, which did the trick. The browser started loading it again without a problem, and our site was back to normal.

But while I was in the CMS, I noticed lots of weirdness related to our other stylesheet templates, which leads me to believe that something weird has happened to these templates specifically (our other non-CSS templates appear to be fine). Namely:

1. None of the CSS templates display the little CSS icon next to them. That is, the image is broken. I looked at the source of the page, and this is the image that should load:

http://ee.urbanturf.com/themes/cp_global_images/css_icon.png

But you’ll see the browser can’t “find” it for some reason. (I know it’s there; I’m staring at the file in my FTP client.)

2. All the CSS templates have their hit counters reset to 0.

Please help. While our site is displaying fine now, I’m worried that something related to our CSS templates is amiss which could rear it’s head again and totally break the display of our site. (We reached out to our host, who was unhelpful.)

EE 1.6.9, build 20100805
#2 / Mar 24, 2011 4:01am

John Henry Donovan
12339 posts

Will,
How are you linking to your the CSS template in your header?
Can you share that please?
Did you set any template caching for those templates?
Are you saving them as files?

#3 / Mar 24, 2011 8:34am

Will Smith

76 posts

Hi John,

Thank you for responding. In answer to your questions:

Yes, I am linking to the CSS templates in the header of our site. If you view source at http://dc.urbanturf.com, you will see them at the top. Here’s a snippet:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html >
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="verify-v1" content="pZyQrWm78PKDcAr4tVW2gfHirj/+mDq1iPf990p27T8=" />
<title>UrbanTurf DC: For buying a home or condo in the Washington, DC area</title>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/reset.css.v.1257878604" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/960.css.v.1257878616" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/text.css.v.1257878593" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/main.css.v.1300982604" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/skin.css.v.1296772974" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/archive.css.v.1292819456" />

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all" href="http://dc.urbanturf.com//S=719a6440522c10514dc81af3a68dd7ba15ad7349/?css=stylesheets/print_article.css.v.1285377628" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/UrbanTurf_DC" />
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Caching is NOT enabled for any of those CSS templates, no.

And no, I am not saving them as files. They are all templates that I modify exclusively within the EE control panel.

I have also attached a screenshot from the control panel to show you how all the Hits have been zeroed. Note that not only were they randomly zeroed yesterday—they persist at 0. That is, some of them, like main.css, have been loaded hundreds or thousands of times even since I posted here yesterday—and yet the Hits still shows 0. This doesn’t seem correct, and it is not the way EE behaved before I started having the problem yesterday.

Thank you,

Will

#4 / Mar 24, 2011 9:17am

Will Smith
76 posts

Let me also add that the issue I described in my first post—the disappearing CSS icons in the EE control panel—has disappeared. It may have been a weird caching issue with my browser. (Though I doubt it, since it coincided with all this other weirdness related to my CSS templates.)

So I’d like to just focus my question on figuring out why the Hits to my CSS files have been reset, and stay at 0 no matter how much time goes by.
#5 / Mar 24, 2011 4:45pm

Sue Crocker
26054 posts

Hi, Will - what about your other templates? Are hits to them showing up as expected? Did something happen on the server? What does the host have to say?
#6 / Mar 24, 2011 5:06pm

Will Smith
76 posts

Hi Sue,

Thanks for the response.

That’s the thing: the other templates seem to have retained their hit count, and the weirdness only touches the CSS templates. See the two attached screenshots for evidence.

And yes, I do assume (but don’t know) that something happened to the server. So I reached out to support at EngineHosting first, but they promptly referred me here.

Sue, are you familiar with any reason/bug/issue that would randomly reset the hit count on a particular type of template?

Will
#7 / Mar 24, 2011 5:07pm

Will Smith
76 posts

Forgot to attach the screenshots.
#8 / Mar 24, 2011 5:59pm

Sue Crocker
26054 posts

No, I have no idea. BUT! If I use the default templates that come with EE 1.7.0, visiting my pages does NOT increment my css template counts.

So I really think this is a non-issue.

Is the information in your css templates working as expected?
#9 / Mar 24, 2011 6:01pm

Will Smith
76 posts

It is.

So I’ll just leave it alone, I guess. Just makes me nervous cuz it’s very clear something is (or was) shaky.

Thanks Sue. Feel free to close this.
#10 / Mar 24, 2011 6:04pm

Sue Crocker
26054 posts

Nothing wrong at all with being cautious. It’s also very helpful we can work closely with EngineHosting in figuring things out. Feel free to start a new thread if you have any more questions.

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