Gareth Jones

Last week sometime I noticed that the Xbox Live card I had on the right (since removed and replaced with small icons) wasn’t displaying correctly. I went to check out Xbox.com only to find that the whole site was failing to load. I assumed that the site must be having some problems and that they would be fixed shortly.

A week later the site was still down for me which prompted me to remove the card and come up with the little icons instead – we can’t be having unsightly error messages on there, can we? I still wanted to know why the site wasn’t working though.

I tried it in IE and it worked straight away. Back to Firefox. No. I disabled my plugins one by one and kept trying the site. No, no, no.

I eventually got down to having no plugins at all turned on and the site was still refusing to work.

I closed Firefox and renamed the profile directory, then ran it again so that it would create a new profile. Xbox.com now worked! So there was something about my profile that the site didn’t like, but it wasn’t any of the plugins. I closed Firefox, removed the new profile and went back to my old one. I cleared my cookies and tried the site again and hurrah! Xbox.com worked once more!

Having since Googled “Firefox Xbox.com” it seems there are lots of people having the same problem so I thought I’d post this article in the hope of helping some of them.  :)

I’ve tried about six or seven different Flickr plugins for WordPress over the last week only to be disappointed to find that they’re either clunky, only work inside the side-bar or don’t work at all. Today I finally found one that I could use as a foundation to build on.

Flickr Photo Album seems to be a fairly popular plugin that, from what I read on the forums, has sadly had many of its features break with the release of WordPress 2.8. The fact that it was so close to what I wanted though (a clean, minimal photo viewer that works in the main content area and not just in the side-bar, though side-bar support is also available) meant that it was worth trying to find out what exactly was broken and how to fix it.

After editing some code and tweaking the layout a bit, I’ve got the plugin working the way I want it to and it’s now displaying my Flickr photos in the My Flickr section.