So I’m looking at my Google Analytics and find that my post Adobe Acrobat Pro X CS6 won’t start: how to fix has over 600 page views (539 unique) for the past month.

For a small-fry like me, that is huge!

I dug deeper and found that the most used Google search phrase for that page was “adobe acrobat x pro won’t open”. I googled it, and my article was #2 right under Adobe.com’s!

If you are reading this on my site, you can see that I run ads on the sidebar. I got excited at the thought of getting some advertising revenue and looked at my advertising stats. There were no clicks registered and the viewed ads number was a lot lower than the page views.

I looked at the page itself and realized the problem. No sidebar was showing up.

I am using a custom child theme of the Twenty Eleven theme, but I had not done anything to change the base single post template. I downloaded index.php and single.php to look for differences and found that “get_sidebar();” was not in single.php. I copied single.php to my custom child theme folder and copy and added “get_sidebar()” function to the same place it appeared in index.php. I uploaded my new version of single.php and saw the sidebar was there, but it was shoved below the content.

Element inspection time. The CSS for the divs #primary and #content was different for the single post template. I added the following code (which is a copy of the #primary and #content from the parent theme and I added “.singular”) to my child theme’s style.css to cancel the parent theme’s CSS and get my sidebar in the right place:

.singular #primary {
float: left;
margin: 0 -26.4% 0 0;
width: 100%;
}

.singular #content {
margin: 0 34% 0 7.6%;
width: 58.4%;
}

On a side note, if you have never worked with WordPress child themes before, I highly recommend reading the WordPress Codex on Child Themes. You should never change the code of a theme someone else has made because if they update the theme you will lose your changes if you update the theme on the Update admin page.