I was playing with IETester, which lets you open Internet Explorer tabs using rendering engines from IE 5.5 up to IE 8 beta 1 for testing compatibility, and noticed for the first time that my blog was throwing a Javascript error only in IE.

Being the pain in the ass IE is, of course the line number it gives isn’t really valid. I looked and looked and couldn’t find the problem. As a last ditch effort, using the IE Developer Toolbar, I hit the menu option to validate the page. Thanks to the W3C Validator, I found that there were some duplicate ID attributes on elements.

After checking out the lines the validator referenced, I found that the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress was improperly tearing apart href attributes for links created by the Footnotes plugin I use, causing it to include long strings of HTML in the onclick attribute for tracking outgoing links¹.

Thankfully, the Analytics plugin has an option to turn off outbound link tracking. I’ll miss those stats, but it’s not like I pay all that much attention to them (or care) anyway.

In the end, I don’t really have anything to test with IETester, it was just a fun toy for a few minutes. It also helped me notice a problem I probably wouldn’t have found otherwise, so in the end it was time well spent.

1. Rather than just the link the user was headed for, as it should – and does for regular links. [↩]