Cheers for Firebug; jeers for Lightbox2
For a while now I’d noticed FC was loading funny. That is, it wasn’t loading. All the content would be there, but the browser would keep churning away at something.
Then I got a couple messages from readers that the problem was manifesting itself more maliciously in other browsers: the site wasn’t loading at all.
The issue is fixed, so it’s not that big a deal, except that it offers another opportunity to tout the Firebug plugin for Firefox. Another of its invaluable features for examining websites is a realtime graph of the browser’s loading of every file on a page—every image, every script, every stylesheet import:
The problem turned out to be the Lightbox2 plugin, at least in combination with the other WordPress image plugin used on this site. I’m not good enough with PHP to say exactly what’s wrong, but Firebug indicates that dozens of functions (or one fuction dozens of times) within Lightbox2 fail to resolve successfully. This after an updated version of Lightbox2 was made available to address this very problem.
