This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
What's up my friends? Thank you so much for pressing play in your podcast player. I'm so glad you're here. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
And let me just tell you, I'm so glad that this series is not tech support with Chris Guillipo because I would fail you all. It might be somewhat humorous, but probably not for the person whose problem we were trying to solve. Okay, so this is not tech support with me, thankfully. But first of all, I've got a little bit of a technical question here that we'll delve into in today's episode. However, it also kind of made me think, well, I'm not a great developer or a website designer.
There's a lot of stuff that I don't know how to do. But a lot of problems that you encounter, like a lot of common tech issues you encounter, are actually not that hard to solve. And I know this because I've encountered them myself. So there are a lot of issues and challenges that are not that hard to overcome. You don't necessarily need a developer to do it.
And as I said, I know this because I've been through all this and it's been frustrating, but with every frustration, hopefully you learn something and then you don't have the same problem later, okay? So today's listener is having a weird problem, okay? The images on his posts are disappearing. What's going on? So we could call this the case of the missing images.
Gonna do a message from our sponsor, and then we'll see what we can do to solve this listener's problem. [Music]
Hey, Chris, this is Frank from Philadelphia. And I'm glad a friend suggested that I listen to your show last year. I recently started a blog about caring for elderly pets. I'm enjoying the process of writing posts and I can see in the stats that some people are already finding the site from Google searches.
The next step is to develop a consulting offer or some kind of information product. But I have a weird problem. The images on some of my posts have disappeared. They look fine when I first published them, but now there's just a big empty box where the image should be. I have no idea what I did.
How can I fix it? Thanks for your help. [Music]
Hey, Frank, what's up? Thank you so much for listening. Glad to know that the blog is starting well with this one exception of this pesky problem, all right?
So yes, I think we might actually have a solution for you here despite the fact that I don't normally do tech support, as mentioned. But probably what has happened here, 'cause I've had this problem myself and I know a lot of bloggers and anybody who's building a website for the first time has experienced this. Probably what has happened here is one of two things. Something has changed with where you are storing those images, like where the images are actually hosted, or with the link itself. So the link to those images that you put into WordPress or Squarespace or whatever interface you were using.
There's always a place where you put your text and then if you wanna put an image, you can upload it there. And then there's some code that says, here's the link on this page. Go and look at this image, right? So what you wanna do is look in that interface, whether it's WordPress or something else, see where the link is going to the image and then copy and paste it in another tab in your browser to see if the images are there. So from there, if you still don't see it at that link, it means something is wrong at that location where the image is supposed to be, okay?
So it's no longer there for whatever reason. So what you wanna do is try re-uploading the images and see if they work now. So whether it's WordPress or something else, in whatever interface you use, there's usually a media library or similar where you can add images. So I would say, first of all, let's add them again and see if it works now. Now, what if it's the other way around?
What if you click that link or copy and paste that link and you do see the image, but you just don't see it on your website. It's that big empty box. It means something is wrong with the link itself, okay? So you might have the wrong formatting in the code that tells your website to show people those nice images. In fact, a common problem in WordPress, I still do this sometimes, is I forget the HTTP colon forward slash forward slash the little syntax that needs to go in front of the links.
That's one of those things where if you're just kinda browsing the web, you don't think about it a whole lot, but once you start making a webpage, you need to make sure to include that. So it could be something else, in which case you need somebody else's help, but I feel pretty confident that it's one of those two things. I hope that's helpful to Frank and anybody else out there who's building a website. If you have a question of your own, just come to sidehustleschool.com/questions. I really enjoy this format of interactivity and I'm excited to bring you more.
So be sure you're subscribed. My name is Chris Guillebeau, this is "Sidasle School." [Music]
- From the Onward Project.
