The Occam’s Razor Method of Error Removal

August 11th, 2007 by The Capitalist

Current Mood:Playful emoticon Playful

It may drive programmers nuts, but it works a lot of the time.

Occam’s Razor basically says something to the effect of “go for the simplest explanation.” While the Razor’s often used in theistic/atheistic arguments, that’s not how I used it in this case!

The error said there was a call to an undefined function in Line 27 of index.php. Now, I could have spent hours and hours trying to find out what that function should do, where the definitions are, was there a typo, etc…

Or I could try the simple solution. Find file. Highlight offending code. Hit the backspace key. Hit Save.

So, I went with simple.

And lo and behold! Not only did the error disappear and the footer appear, I got my left-side column appearing, now, too! Before, it wasn’t appearing, even though this theme said it should have 2 sidebars. It should be a simple matter now to adjust the columns so that they aren’t showing redundant info.

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