Question

I run a sub-site at my work, and while my live site is on the same “main server” as the company’s main site, my dev environment is hosted on a separate server.

For some reason my dev site is unable to access a specific JavaScript file that is hosted on the “main server”. All of the other JavaScript files, like jQuery, and jQueryTools can be accessed, but main.js cannot. My only guess would be because it is a custom JavaScript file created by our head web developer, but I don’t know why that would make a difference. (Cross-site scripting limitations?)

I link to it just like I do with all the other JavaScript files, right after our main wrapper (it’s the 3rd from the bottom):

<script type="text/javascript" src="ui/2009/js/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ui/2009/js/jquerytools/1.2.2/jquery.tools.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ui/2009/js/jquery.cycle.all.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ui/2009/js/main.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ui/2009/js/jquery.jgfeed-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="ui/2009/js/hr.js"></script>

Answer 1

To troubleshoot follow these steps:

• Check whether the file ui/2009/js/main.js is actually in that
  location, if so be sure it doesn’t have uppercase characters (the
  server OS may be case sensitive)

• Check whether the file main.js has the same permissions (i.e. chmod) as the other .js files (e.g. 755)

• Check whether the file main.js is actually accessed (how do you know the file is
  not accessed from your page in the dev server? It may be accessed but not working because of variable
  conflicts with the .js you previously load, for instance). To do so,
  you can a) check the server logs and see if you have a “not found”
  error referred to the main.js file b) in main.js delete temporarily all
  the content and print some simple output (either to screen with
  document.write or to the javascript console with console.log)