A few weeks ago I went to the Annual Credit Report site to get my free credit report from the top 3 credit reporting agencies in the country. After I got my first report, I had problems getting the other 2 reports.

The problem… I automatically block javascript (if you’re not a tekkie, the information at this link probably won’t help you lol) for every new site I visit because I hate popups and those stupid cookie messages that seem to show up everywhere. When I first got to the site above, I allowed javascript and assumed all would be well. It turned out that after I got the first report, it transferred me to another page that wasn’t a fully participatory page on their site, which meant I had to turn on javascript again. However, when I turned it on things went wonky, and I lost the ability to get the last two reports.

Luckily I found a contact page where I was able to tell them I had problems getting the last two reports, and a week later I got both of them via regular mail. I didn’t tell them it was probably my fault; why volunteer information they didn’t ask for? lol

Because I have a lot of privacy settings on my main browser, which is Firefox, every once in a while I have problems pulling up new sites or sites I’ve already been to but don’t go to that often. What I used to do was open Chrome, which I don’t trust as much (I don’t trust Google all that much these days), and open the sites, knowing I’m going to be tracked. Now I know how to fix that problem, which I’m going to tell you about here.

It turns out all you have to do is go into your browser settings and look for the area that talks about cookies. Do a search for the site you’re having problems with, remove the cookies you can find, then open the website again. It works about 95% of the time immediately; sometimes you have to go back in and see if you can find another link to the same site to delete those cookies as well.

I wish I could tell you why that happens, but I only know what cookies do; I don’t know how they actually work or why you might have multiple links for the same site. I just know it happens; those sneaky so-and-so’s!

If you can’t find any other links and you’re still having the problem, the only way to fix it is to remove all cookies, close and reopen your browser, and all will be fine. Of course that means you have to put all the passwords you usually save back in, but sometimes it’s the best way to go.

Earlier today I ran into another problem. I was checking out this site on my smartphone, seeing what it looked like on mobile. Since I switched to this new theme my articles are loading faster, but I wanted to see what it looked like.

It was a mess! Everything was in the wrong place! I kind of freaked out, wondering if I’d done something horribly wrong when I’d made some coding changes.

I went online and started looking for new themes; this one had to be broken. I did that for about 5 minutes, then realized I was overreacting; I hadn’t done all my normal research yet to see if I could figure out the problem.

I went into the Appearance panel, then looked at Customize. What I was seeing was what I should have been seeing on my smartphone. I was flummoxed; what was going on?

I opened my phone again, which has the Chrome browser on it by default, and decided to see what my site looked like on another browser. I downloaded Firefox, looked at my site… and it looked like it was supposed to. What the hey?

I gave it some thought… then decided what I needed to try was deleting all the cookies off Chrome. Unlike the desktop version, you don’t have the ability to search for specific sites. Thus, I cleared them all out… it took almost 3 minutes. Once I was done, I pulled up my site… perfect!

A couple of weeks ago I asked if you were ready to do the work to get things right. I should have added that sometimes the biggest issues might be the easiest to fix. Sometimes our problems are only our problems, especially when it comes to technology. How many of you still know someone who can’t figure out how to set the time on their… TV (I almost said VCR but no one has those anymore lol)?

Don’t overreact to problems that befall you. Take time to think, time to research, time to figure it out. There’s always time to get someone else to help you if it’s needed.

Giving you a breather after the length of the previous article. 🙂