When the Unexpected Happens: Troubleshooting the Impossible

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I recently gave my portfolio a full rebuild (you can check it out at johnrhea.com). After countless hours of tweaking, testing, and fixing tiny bugs on my local machine, I triumphantly deployed the shiny new version to the server—only to watch it completely fall apart.

Now, browsers are supposed to interpret JavaScript the same way, right? Maybe Chrome and Firefox have their quirks, but if the code is the same and the browser is the same, it should behave the same—regardless of the server. Or so I thought.

That’s when things started to go sideways.

First, the dynamically generated stars on the homepage didn’t appear. Then, the interactive game mode—a core feature—just showed a blank screen. No evil website enemies. No missiles. Nothing. On the portfolio page, little animated cars were supposed to zoom down a street. They were nowhere to be found.

Here’s a video of what it was supposed to look like (imagine something cool happening here):

[Video of cars zooming]

Naturally, I handled this with complete composure. No crying. No frustration. Just calm, cool, collected debugging.

Okay, maybe not entirely.

I started frantically Googling phrases like “Why is JavaScript different on two servers?” and “Can a server change how JavaScript works?” and “Why does everyone think I’m crying when I’m clearly not?” But nothing useful came up.

The browser console showed errors, but they didn’t make much sense. I had an SVG element—let’s call it car (because that’s what I named it). I created it in vanilla JavaScript, added it to the DOM, and animated it down a gray strip that represented a street (in space—because why not?). I used car.style.transform to animate it, but I kept getting an error saying car.style was undefined.

Back on my local machine? Everything worked perfectly.

To bypass the issue, I switched to using setAttribute instead: car.setAttribute(‘style’, ‘transform: translate(100px, 200px)’);. That worked—until the next error. When I tried to access data attributes like car.dataset.xspeed, they came back undefined. These have been supported on SVG elements since 2015, and again, everything worked locally. So what gives?

I reached out to my hosting provider, thinking maybe some server configuration was interfering. The support tech—whom I’ll call Truckson (not his real name, but it fits)—was polite and helpful, but after checking all the basics, he had no answers. They support JavaScript, but custom code issues? That’s on me. Thanks, Truckson.

Still dry-eyed (I swear), I turned to ChatGPT and asked: “Why would JavaScript behave differently on two servers?” It offered a slew of possible causes—all wrong:

– Maybe I was mixing inline SVG with SVG in an tag? Nope.
– Could the browser be interpreting the page as plain text? No.
– Was it running in quirks mode? Also no.
– Did I use document.createElement instead of createElementNS for SVG? Nope, I used the correct namespace.

(Also, ChatGPT’s responses were peppered with phrases like “Now we’re getting spicy 🔥” and “That’s a juicy one 🍇,” which made me feel like I was debugging with a particularly enthusiastic sous-chef.)

Desperate, I gave ChatGPT some of my code. It kept suggesting that maybe the car element wasn’t actually an SVG element on the server. Which made no sense—because it clearly was locally.

Then it hit me.

I logged the namespace of the car element. It should’ve been:

http://www.w3.org/2000/svg

But what printed was:

https://www.w3.org/2000/svg

One letter. One tiny “s.” And yet, that was enough to break everything.

See, namespaces don’t work like regular URLs. They’re identifiers, not links. Adding that “s” was like writing document.createElementNS(“Gimme-them-SVGzers”, “svg”); — completely invalid.

But why was it different on the server?

I remembered enabling a setting in my host’s optimization plugin: “Automatically fix insecure pages.” It scans your site and rewrites insecure links to use HTTPS. Great for most things. But apparently, it also rewrote namespace URLs inside JavaScript.

I disabled that feature, redeployed, and just like that—everything worked.

Stars twinkled. Cars zoomed. Lasers fired at terrible websites. And my portfolio was finally alive.

No tears. No victory dances. Just sweet, sweet relief.

Have you ever run into a bizarre, seemingly impossible bug like this? Share your war stories in