It could be Bloglines–well, no, probably not.
It might be Firefox.
It might be something else entirely.
Whatever the cause, I’m finding that in many but not all cases where bloggers either incorporate a photo or a video into a post, or even link to a site that has such a video, the photo or video is nowhere to be seen.
(Never mind the irritating curiosity of Travelin’ Librarian’s feed, which includes lots, lots of titles that are apparently for missing photos–and if you go to the blog itself, neither the titles nor the photos are there. I’m guessing TL is somehow merging a Flickr feed into his RSS feed, and surely wish there was a way to turn that off…)
Today was particularly odd: A link from a blog to a Slate column that incorporates a video, No video screen. No button to bring up the video. And that’s a site where I’ve watched videos before.
In one sense, it’s fine: I’m starting to fall behind on writing and reading anyway, so spending less time plowing through blogs and watching videos is probably a good thing. But it sure is mysterious…especially because it’s not all videos or photos. Not even close.
A few troubleshooting steps
1. can you see the videos/photos elsewhere in Firefox but just not through bloglines?
2. are you running greasemonkey? have you tried this with GM off?
3. Are you running Ad-Block? have you tried this wth AB off?
I find that for me this often happens when I inadvertently block a server that is giving me lousy ads on one [age but might be serving video/image content that is more necessary on another site. You can also try starting FF in “safe mode” and see if that helps.
1. Generally, yes–but in most cases, if it doesn’t show up in the Bloglines preview, it also doesn’t show up if I click through.
2. I don’t even know what GreaseMonkey is, so I’m probably not running it.
3. The only add-on I’m running is Google Toolbar. Otherwise, I have fairly vanilla settings.
This isn’t really a big problem. There’s very little “necessary” video/image content…and most of what is necessary, I see. This is mostly in the minor-nuisance category. Thanks for the tips, though.
Not sure if it’s still the case, but Bloglines used to refuse to show images if they didn’t have a full URL as their HTML “src”. In other words, if the blog poster had used a relative link (e.g. src=”images/pic.jpg”) then the image wouldn’t appear.
Is this happening at home or work? Or both? Here at my place of business we have those symptoms. We are running web filtering software which doesn’t block videos but instead puts up a warning screen first (to ask do you really want to be using the bandwidth for this). If the video is embedded in something else the warning screen can’t show so you just get a big blank box.
Well, as of 10/1 there’s no distinction between home and work. I suspect it’s some bizarre Firefox issue that’s not worth pursuing…