Force Refresh. It's a good thing. I think.

You'll notice, in yesterday's post (link to my blog, Pitter-Pat, Kev's Back.), I didn't use many "rich text" elements. By Batman's beard, Blogger's "Compose" mode was gone! You know what that is if you use blogger. Otherwise, there's three modes: Edit Html, Compose, and Preview. (Preview previews the post in a cheap way. It's underpowered, yeah.)

"Compose" mode is a rich text editor, but not too rich. "Edit Html" is basically Notepad, except that if I typed the HTML tags <i> and </i> it would, in the final publish, appear in italics. I could not see it in italics until published, though. (Go here, to Blogging Basics 101, to see how to display the tags without the browser converting them. Bookmark it. It's cool!)

I could not see a list of my labels. Adding pictures would require more than clicking "upload to blogger lol". Simply put, it was hell on earth. As I pored over the myriad help articles and forums, all hope seemed lost. The only conclusion I could come to was that I recently installed a new Java update...maybe that was it.

As a last-ditch test, I opened Opera. (A browser; you know, like Firefox.) Sure enough, it showed the Compose mode. How sweet to look upon its ...interface! (That's clever.) Then that meant...it wasn't Java.

And for the third time today, all hope seemed lost. (It's been a rough day.) Then I opened up this forum. In it, they said to do a force refresh. Following their instructions, I pressed Ctrl and F5. It's like a normal refresh, but it takes a long time. I have no idea on earth what force refresh is, but hey, it fixed it despite my lack of knowledge! I can't find any information on it. What I could find seemed to hint that it sort of renews your cache of the website. So...something must have been missing from my Create Post page, and my browser couldn't detect that it was missing. That's probably wrong, but it's the best my 10 minutes of research could do.

So if you're ever in the position I was, try force refreshing. I'm sure it's common knowledge for some people, of course. If you use some weird browser, you may need to get the command for that specific browser; it may not be Ctrl+F5. Chances are, you'll never need it. They say that most police officers never use their gun. But they still carry it.


Alternately, your problem may be that you accidentally turned Compose mode off. Go to Settings > Basic and turn "Show Compose Mode for all your blogs?" on.

If it's already on, it could be a few issues, probably some that haven't even happened yet. Take the keywords "Compose," "Compose tab," "Compose mode," "Html and compose mode," and go look for yourself. Combine them with words like "not working," "not showing," "damn the world," and you're sure to find whatever you are looking for.



Whateeeever that might be.