This is a Wordpress troubleshooting post for people, like me, who still have a lot to learn. So if you don’t like to look beneath the bonnet or already have a gold star in PHP, I’d hop off now.
A couple of weeks ago all the fonts on my home page, with the exception of the most recently-posted blog, suddenly became italicised. The problem only affected the home page – no other page.
I ferreted around in the stylesheets (not knowing exactly what I was looking for) and was left scratching my head.
A cry for help on the excellent Wordpress Forum was answered by a man (or woman) of few words and great wisdom called Whooami. He/she wrote: ‘Validate!’ Followed by a link.
I know that validation is the process of checking the integrity of code, but I wasn’t aware of a browser tool called Validator. I went to the website, typed in my domain … and was shocked to find all sorts of odds and ends wrong with my syntax.
However, Validator found the cause of the font problem – my use of ‘&’ in ‘Subscribe & Follow’ in a siderbar text widget – like this:
# Warning Line 423, Column 109: character “&” is the first character of a delimiter but occurred as data
It helpfully went on to explain possible fixes. By simply changing the ampersand for ‘and’, the problem with all other fonts was instantly solved.
Moral of story: Validate!
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