Um, in with the old, out with the new, I guess. With the help of Gerson and some poking around online, I’ve figured out why the comments sometimes seem to go all wonky in different browsers. Essentially, Blogger used to use an 8-digit ID number for each post, which was fine. Then they switched to an 18-digit number, which is a little too long for javascript and which, therefore, often throws the whole thing for a loop. That’s why you’d have different browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer rounding the numbers differently and sometimes giving you pop-ups without comments when there obviously should have been some.

I’ve attempted to implement a fix in order to prevent it from happening too often again, but the fix leaves a number of earlier links (including some as recent as yesterday) broken and showing no comments. To really fix things, I’ll apparently have to go through the source files for all my archived posts and match numbers there with numbers in my cgi-bin directory. Which, at the moment, I’m not really prepared to do. (Espcially since even that is apparently not a perfect fix and still allows for comment errors.)

So you may again notice that some comments are missing and some counts are wrong. This time, however, I hope that’s what everyone’s seeing. While it may leave a lot of broken links and missing comments in its wake, I’m hoping this fix will at least prevent the same problems from happening with posts from this point on.

Fingers crossed. We’ll see.