365 Discoveries

This is actually pretty stupid of me to do this, but I have to laugh at it. At the end of January, I was forwarded some information I was expected to post on a web site I administer. After sitting on it for awhile, I simply copied the information from the email, and pasted it into the WordPress visual editor. The email  contained a photo which, to my surprise, appeared in the post perfectly formatted. Apparently, I thought nothing of this.

Today, I went back to edit the page because I noticed a typo. Often, when you go to edit a page or post in WordPress, the HTML of the content will appear briefly before the TinyMCE visual editor has a chance to load. So, during that half-second, something in the code caught my eye; something about the image. I checked it out, and it seemed that all this time, the photo was being called from mail.google.com. I thought that couldn’t be right; Google isn’t going to play photo host through their Gmail system. But, the picture was there in the editor and the live page. But, wait a minute… I loaded the page in Internet Explorer (I had been using Firefox), and the image was broken. The problem? Whenever I edited or visited the page, I was also logged into Gmail with the same account that the image came from, so the image loaded because Firefox was authenticated while Internet Explorer wouldn’t be.

I should have known better. When you copy and paste stuff on the web (like web-based email), your browser is actually copying the code behind the content you’ve selected. If the image had already come from another web site like Flickr or Picasa, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But, anyway… another day, another lesson learned.