I have been under the hood messing with the engine…
Posted by Pixelhead
I had no choice, I had to get my hands onto the engine of the blog. Viewed in Internet Explore(IE), the sidebar of the blog was pushed down to the bottom of the page. As much as I dislike IE, I know that many people still use it for their browsing platform. I too was an avid IE user, but after having IE crash for the umpteenth time, I decided to give Firefox a try, and have been a satisfied Firefox user ever since.
Anyway, I fixed the problem with IE. I went onto the Wordpress forum, but was unable to fix the browser problem, then I went onto Lorelle VanFossen’s Blog post The Battle Between Image Width and Column Width. According to Lorelle, when a post has items such as banners or pictures that are too large for the post, IE is unable to handle this situation, and it therefore pushes the sidebar down below the content.
Prior to reading the fore mentioned post, I had been tooling around in the template files for the past week or so, with no success. However, after reading Lorelle’s post, and then going onto the blog in IE, I noticed that after clicking on an idividual post, the sidebar was visible. After a bit of pondering, I decided to open up each post until the sidebar would not open. This strategy worked wonderfully. The defective post was Mybloglog Favorites of the Week from Feb. 18th. I had been messing around with an affiliate program at the time, and I had placed a banner add on the bottom of the post which was too wide for the post. I actually only had the adds on the site for about a week, when I decided I did not like them,and had removed all of the adds, but this one must have escaped my detection.
Well anyways, it was a good experience. I certainly would not have gotten into the template files and explored their capabilities if I had not been trying to fix something. After all “if it isn’t broken, don’t mess with it” is a motto that I live by.
Now fortunately or unfortunately, I am thinking about redesigning the blog. Getting into the template files as well as utilizing the Mosilla Validator are partially to blame for this aspiration. A major influence was the post by Alister Cameron,New design, new network, new title, new underwear!, were he talks about some updates he has made with his site including the new design. It is a nice looking site, but redesigning might be a bit out of my grasp at the moment, but I am sure I will continue to tinker, and will eventually get around to either adapting another template such as the one used by Alister or as suggested by Lorelle, make one from scratch.
Written by Pixelhead on March 29th, 2007 with
6 comments.
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#1. March 29th, 2007, at 6:30 PM.
I do not recommend designing a WordPress Theme from scratch. You’ve just had a taste of why.
I recommend it to those who know what they are doing and how to fix it when they screw up. You’ve discovered that the answer isn’t always as easy as it may first appear. It’s easy to blame the browser when it’s the content that’s screwing things up.
I’m glad you figured this out and that my article helped. It make what I do all the more worthwhile. Thank you.