Sunday, January 29, 2006

Weblog Error

Wouldn't you know it ... just when I thought everything was just fine with this weblog ... I discovered it isn't. Thanks to a friend in Australia who was viewing a recent post with his Internet Explorer (IE) browser he alerted me to a problem. It seems when viewing this weblog in IE all the links on the right-side of the page are shown at the very bottom of the page, instead of the top. Now, that is NOT the way it is supposed to be. And the problem only seems to exist when viewing this weblog in the IE browser. The weblog page looks just fine using the Foxfire browser.


I wasn't aware of the problem because I rarely use IE anymore ... since a friend recommended Foxfire many months ago. So I'm certainly grateful to find out about my weblog IE problem, although a bit late. So I went to work trying fix things so IE users would have a "good" page to look at, too. Well, that led to the next frustration. I couldn't find a solution on my own. No problem, I thought, I'll just contact the program support department ... they'll help me fix things. Not to be. Their online Help didn't have information to solve my particular problem, so I wrote them. I received a standard computer-generated reply ... and it essentially said to go look in Help. Hmmmm! That led me back to where I'd come from.


Does this sound familiar to you? Computers and the Internet are so wonderful ... until something goes wrong and you are stuck for a solution. Then they are so frustrating.


In case this weblog is one that you'd like to revisit on occasion and you use IE ... my apologies. Until someone comes to save the day for me the only suggestion that I can offer is to view the posts with Foxfire. It's my browser of choice ... maybe you'll find it more to your liking, too.


Now, having made my explanation about the weblog error and becoming more frustrated as I think about the inability to solve it ... I'll stomp out to the deck to watch the birds. It is the best way to calm down.

2 comments:

John B. said...

I have seen similar problems on other weblogs with a sidebar on the right-hand side. I don't know why IE does that. All I can say is that Firefox is better, for that and other reasons.

John B. said...

I have been working on this with respect to my own blog, and I may have a solution.... The problem appears to be that IE makes some elements too big, so that they don't fit into the spaces where they are supposed to go. So I would suggest fiddling with the proportions a bit until it looks right on both Firefox and IE. Go into your template and find the part labelled "Content" (it's near the top). There is one heading labelled "#content (...)" and included in that is "width:660px;" This governs the total width of posts and sidebar. I would suggest increasing this a little; alternately you could decrease the width of the main and sidebar columns. It should not require a big adjustment - just enough to compensate. Hopefully that should solve the problem.