Site Display Issues — 20 March 2022

Greetings, fellow CA community members. As you may already know, this website is a dynamic creature whose components are constantly being updated and upgraded. Our site is built on the WordPress architecture, a user-friendly platform that allows mere mortals to create and maintain websites, and utilizes software components known as plugins, which add desired functionality not built-in to WordPress. Both WordPress and the plugins are improved constantly, although from time to time these updates have unexpected effects on the site and how it operates. As such, we also maintain a test site where we run these updates to determine if they will cause and adverse issues on CA News. Usually, we are able to catch problems with updates and delay making changes to the live site until those issues have been resolved. Most of the time, these updates do not cause problems.

One issue has become apparent over time, and that relates to the browser software used by our members. These browsers include Chrome, Safari and other applications, whether on PCs, Macs or mobile devices. Over time, newer technology is developed which may not function properly with older, out-of-date browser software. This is a fact of life for the internet, although it can be a source of consternation for those of us with older computers that don’t support the latest browswer software. If you are running an older computer, chances are you’ve come across websites which refuse to load or which don’t display properly on your machine.

Recently we updated WordPress, along with a host of plugins that had to be revised to function properly with the newer version of the architecture. Since those major updates, it has become apparent that CA News does not load and/or display properly on some older browsers. My personal experience is with the older version of Safari on my 12 year old desktop Mac. While the site does load, several graphical components no longer load properly, including the site Logo in the banner, specialized fonts, various icons and the featured images for our articles (see my screen shot below). Fortunately for me, I also have the Chrome browser on my old girl, and it displays the site normally. As time goes on, I expect that even my version of Chrome will eventually not display the site properly, but hopefully not for some time to come.

If you have noticed display issues, this is why. You may be able to add a newer version of your browser software to restore your CA News experience to what it should be. For those who would like more information, please feel free to leave a comment on the Help Desk and we can work with you individually to offer some guidance on upgrading your browser software. For those of you with newer hardware and software, hopefully this won’t become an issue for you any time soon. Thank you all for being a part of our community.