Update (July 29, 2006): The style sheet has been fixed, thanks to Bad Reader Aaron Knapp! This means the layout problem in IE is definitely fixed. However, I do not have access to Safari, so if you are a Mac/Safari surfer, leave a comment here and let me know if the problem with the single column layout is fixed.
Folks, I upgraded the blog today, and there were some issues with the software. I think I fixed all the critical ones (I don’t have error messages screaming at me when I try to post, for example), but I know there is at least one bug floating around; IE is displaying my sidebar at the bottom of the screen. Grrrr. I’ll be fixing that one on Saturday if I can figure it out. Anyway, stick tight, and if you see anything weird, then feel free to comment.
It looks like I’ll have to upgrade again soon, too, since they’re releasing another patch to WordPress. Sigh. It’s good software, and I recommend it to people who are starting blogs. But once you start to hack the code, like I did for this theme, upgrading gets complicated. Bear with me please.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:16 am
You’re right, BA. Navigation bar on the left is in the correct position, but the right-hand-side-bar starts below all the text.
Maybe it’s a bug with IE?
July 29th, 2006 at 12:48 am
Maybe it would be a nice idea to specify font sizes in points, not in pixels. Then you’d make sure than they render the same size on every monitor. I have a slighly older laptop I sometimes use to read this blog, and while the font size of the bar at the right is huge, the actual content is very small, and the letters in the response form fields appear even smaller.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:25 am
People using IE should switch to another browser (any other), and all problems on the internet will be resolved.
In particular, we can then finally use CSS and MathML to its fullest extent.
Often when I make a website I have php detect the browser version and redirect all IE6 users to a “hacked” version.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:45 am
Firefox has been very, very good to me, except for some problems with video I haven’t figured out just yet.
July 29th, 2006 at 2:04 am
People still use IE? Man, how does anyone live without tabbed browsing?
July 29th, 2006 at 3:04 am
What’s tabbed browsing?
July 29th, 2006 at 5:10 am
You think IE’s bad?, Safari (WebKit actually) renders the whole blog as one column (with the new CSS): http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/2440/badastronomyblog20060729up2.png (Quite large image, a direct grab from WebKit using “Paparazzi!”)
I agree with Wordpress though, it’s a bitch to upgrade once you make any changes to the core files, maybe i should look into UNIX diff/patch to make it easier.
Oh yeah, first time commenter, long time reader, great blog (and site), and i’ll get around to reading your book sometime soon
July 29th, 2006 at 5:54 am
Yeah, tabbed browsing, I’ve never heard of that. I wonder where I can find it?
You know, I’m getting fed up with hearing about tabbed browsing, fed up with being lectured not to use IE. It’s like the old PC/Mac wars all over again. The constant nagging is annoying. Shut up already!
July 29th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Tabbed browsing works among others in Firefox, where instead of opening a new window to view a different page, you create tabs at the top of the browser (a bit like the tabs at the bottom in Windows). This means that you have only one browser window open at the time: Much cleaner. Instead of opening new windows using CTRL-N, you open new tabs with CTRL-T.
As for the “constant nagging”: If IE would support the standard features for web browsing such as CSS and MathML, I wouldn’t care at all what other people use. But now I have to do bug fixing when I create a web site, because IE is years behind all the other browsers. Just give Firefox or Opera a try. It’s free, and you will probably like it.
July 29th, 2006 at 6:46 am
IE7 supports both tabbing and CSS, so if you upgrade to the latest beta version and live with the extra error message at startup, you can do tabbing as well!
July 29th, 2006 at 7:10 am
Am I the only one that get an error when I submit a comment?
I have been getting it for the last couple of months, but have always assumed that BA would fix when the comment section was being upgraded as promised by BA.
July 29th, 2006 at 7:28 am
I got an error earlier, and when I resubmitted it said it removed the duplicate entry. But most of the time I do not get errors.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:57 am
I had a problem with one of the sites I host and the template it used in regards to an annoying “float” property problem, of course in IE. Maybe that’s a place to look, at any rate.
IE7 isn’t ready for prime time, and especially not when you have business to do that relies on certain things in IE6 that aren’t quite “there” in IE7. Our new sales guy wrecked his ability to use most of our productivity software (browser based, whee!) because he had the bright idea (on his second day on the job) to perform his own upgrade… argh.
As for the constant nagging: Tabbed browsing really is the bee’s knees, but more importantly there’s something to be said for not using the #1 mechanism by which malware can land on your PC. Yes, it’s better than it used to be, but not good enough to make me comfortable using IE for anything other than using wholly trusted sites (like our company’s in-house tools).
July 29th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Hey BA,
I’ve also been seeing rendering problems, in Safari on Mac. This is not new issue today, but has been a problem for a few weeks now. The blog post and comments are all being rendered way down low, so that all you see are sidebars when the page comes up. If you don’t scroll down, it looks like there’s no post at all.
July 29th, 2006 at 9:33 am
BA, I would like to second Scott’s Comment. I am seeing to exact same thing on my PowerBook when using Safari.
July 29th, 2006 at 9:43 am
I upgraded my site last night to 2.0.4 with no problems, Phil, especially not with the theme I cobbled together. I’m not sure why it would do anything to mess with your layout.
July 29th, 2006 at 9:46 am
As rendered in firefox, the white background stops at the bottom of the right-hand sidebar, which means every second comment is black text on a fairly dark — yow, the page just refreshed itself while I was still typing that sentence, and now the right-hand sidebar is a lot taller and I can’t tell whether there is an issue with the backgrounds. I guess BA is online and working on it right now.
July 29th, 2006 at 9:52 am
Following up to myself … it appears to be taking a very long time for FF to render some of the stuff in the right-hand sidebar. The right sidebar got taller because the Blogroll et al. were not there before, and they were slow to reappear after I submitted the previous comment.
July 29th, 2006 at 9:53 am
You know, if all of you geeks would just give up and join the Microsoft zombies, the world would work exactly as King Bill wants it and we would all be happy. But Noooo, all of you want to do things your own way. So you mess around with things outside of your abilities and mess things up. Trust Microsoft, Bill is always right…
July 29th, 2006 at 10:07 am
1) I upgraded to WP 2.0.3, which is all that is out right now (2.0.4 is in beta, so I’ll wait for it to be official).
2) The IE problem with the sidebar is new since yesterday’s upgrade, and it’s weird– I can’t think of why the upgrade would do that.
3) I know about the Safari issue…
4) I had a volunteer look at my CSS, and he claims he fixed everything, so IE, Safari, and FF will look good. Wow! I will be testing that today, so bear with me!
July 29th, 2006 at 11:15 am
I swear by Opera – I haven’t used anything else for years. I particularly like the zoom option by means of ctrl key + mouse wheel. I don’t think any other browser can do that, at least not as well as Opera can!
July 29th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
I had a problem with that side-bar-at-the-bottom-in-IE thing with my blog when I decided to widen my content. It seems to me in IE, if the width of x number of elements (greater than one) adds up to 100% or more of the width of their container, IE can’t handle it. so in my Blogger account when I made the #main column and #sidebar column 70% and 30% respecitevly, they fit in Firefox but IE put the sidebar on the bottom. The problem was immediately fixed when I slimme d #main some, also taking into account the margin-left of my sidebar.
AT least this is the way IE works with classed elements that are positioned withthe flost: property.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:34 pm
That layout problem is fixed now. Looks good.
Mike said:
“… Trust Microsoft, Bill is always right… ”
Mmmm,yes. The computer is your friend. Please report for termination.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
Grey Duck said:
“… there’s something to be said for not using the #1 mechanism by which malware can land on your PC.”
Yes, but I’d run a firewall and antivirus software no matter what browser I used. And I only have to do a spyware scan once every month or two. I’ve only once ever had a serious spyware problem (to date), and the anti- spyware software I had at the time couldn’t fix it anyway.
Besides, whichever browser is most popular will be targeted by the authors of malware.
July 29th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Your BA’ship: If ever you are curious to see what your stuff looks like in Safari, have a look at http://www.danvine.com/icapture/ (free).
I like the look so far.
July 29th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
On Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista (no XP around here to try XP IE7 with) the layout is now broken (I’m sure I looked earlier and it worked fine). The main sidebar is way off to the right, about 50% of the page width too far.
July 29th, 2006 at 2:12 pm
The blog is looking good in Safari now — the single column problem is GONE!
July 29th, 2006 at 2:13 pm
The single column problem in Safari is GONE! It’s looking pretty good now.
July 29th, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Paul, you mean the right hand sidebar?
Given that IE7 and Vista are not officially out yet, I’m not too concerned.
Probelm is, of course, that half my readers will be using that eventually. Sigh.
July 29th, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Firefox does the ctrl+mousewheel up/down to change font size…Opera is sorta outdated isn’t it?
July 29th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
Of course, if web site designers would stick to standard code, concentrating on the conveying of information, rather than on making a flashy, pretty display that looks just-so, the whole issue of what browser to use would be moot.
That is to say, less form, more substance.
Frankly, I miss the Lynx days. I’d love to see: No Java, almost no javascript; a meteor strike on every Shockwave/Flash development; and everyone who puts frames on their page condemned to sit in a room with animated rainbow gifs for walls and blink-tagged text all over everything.
July 29th, 2006 at 4:18 pm
That’s right Phil, it seems the !important in “margin-left: 713px!important;” is throwing it out another 713 pixels, removing !important makes it appear correctly, but in Firefox it makes the sidebar fall to the left of the page.
Also happens in IE7 Beta 3 on Win XP.
July 29th, 2006 at 4:23 pm
Evolving Squid, I agree. That’s why I write my stuff in php with style sheets. Pity IE6 does not fully support them. Hence the hacking…
July 29th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
I’m a safari user and everything looks fine. Great job!
July 29th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Squid, I spent years concentrating on the substance on this site, and to be brutally honest sites need some flashiness to get spotted. I could just make this all text and inlined images, y’know! But there must be some attention paid to the form as well. That’s why I have a limited three column layout, for example. Navigation and ease-of-use depend critically on form. Alternating the colors of the background in the comments makes them easier to read. The grey borders separate various sections. And so on.
I also just added “Add this entry to: digg.com reddit.com del.icio.is” as well. I’ll probably talk about that in a separate entry later this week.
July 29th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
B.A.,
I’ve tried this page on every browser I’ve got (Safari, Firefox, Camino, OmniWeb; all on a Mac), and it’s displaying correctly on all of them.
As for WordPress, well, if you ever decide to switch to a Mac, there are some DRAMATICALLY easier ways to go. And you know what they say — once you go Mac, you’ll never go back.
Lorne
July 29th, 2006 at 8:51 pm
Oh, and another thing — I’m still getting errors when I submit a comment.
July 29th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
Lorne-
I use Macs and PCs equally, and find about the same (although different) likes and dislikes with each. Then again, people always said I was weird. I’ve always found the “cult of Mac” mildly disturbing, although OS X beats the heck out of Linux if you need to run UNIX based code and still want to have a decent front-end. (Sorry to all you Linux users, I had a bad experience).
Oh, and I’m glad to see the page finally looks normal again in Safari.
July 29th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
I never saw what was so great about Macs either. Not since using RISCOS on a proper computer. You know, one with system architecture that actually indicates intelligent design. Oh, no, hang on a sec, that was a can of worms I just opened there…
July 30th, 2006 at 3:56 am
Hi there,
You can use the following web site to remotely test your page on Safari. You simply type in a URL, choose the screen size you want to test with and submit the form. The web site then send the URL to a permanently connected Mac running Safari, it takes a screen grab and then sends it back to you via the web page immediately. It’s pretty good and for real!
Kaustav
http://astrolondon.com/
July 30th, 2006 at 3:57 am
Oh dear, I forgot to actually paste in the URL on my previous post:
http://www.snugtech.com/safaritest/
Hi there,
You can use the following web site to remotely test your page on Safari. You simply type in a URL, choose the screen size you want to test with and submit the form. The web site then send the URL to a permanently connected Mac running Safari, it takes a screen grab and then sends it back to you via the web page immediately. It’s pretty good and for real!
http://www.snugtech.com/safaritest/
Kaustav
http://astrolondon.com/
July 30th, 2006 at 4:14 am
Why you wouldn’t want a Mac:
& Btw this guy actually uses them so he should know what he’s ranting about 
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-773770276749807883
July 30th, 2006 at 4:18 am
Oh and everything is loading & looking great in Firefox & IE for me. Even that annoying page of error messages when posting a reply has gone now
July 30th, 2006 at 5:36 am
Just commenting to check if the error message has disappeared.
July 30th, 2006 at 5:39 am
Indeed it has!
Only now, the boxes under “leave a Reply” are no longer aligned, but this could be an artistic choice?
July 30th, 2006 at 5:52 am
I didn’t read most of these comments, but what about the Messenger spacecraft fly-by showing the earth spinning below it? How would this fellah make that jive?
July 30th, 2006 at 6:13 am
Sorry about the double post, but the above post was supposed to be for the Craknocentrism entry… Sorry again!
July 30th, 2006 at 8:15 am
While I adore windows and as a programmer I’m in awe of what microsoft created. However, I have to say for the most part Microsoft products are always pretty much ho hum and the only reason they are the most popular is market penetration. Obviously this includes IE which compared to firefox looks very dry and the features aren’t there, security is another issue.
July 30th, 2006 at 8:25 am
I concur with the other Safari users, it looks good now,(except I have not found the Preview button). And the small font presentation is easily varied by use of the buttons, and the rendering is only for the text and only within the same width, which I like as I dislike overly long lines – makes it too hard to read as the same line gets read twice otherwise, well at least the first couple of words anyway. Any graphic or photo is not varied, and there are now no big blank spaces.
Not sure what the fuss is about “tabs”, as it seems logical to have another window opened, and further windows even as a link is followed, and when these are dismissed, the parent window is still there to continue, or whatever. With that in mind, how would I gain anything by opening in a tab?
I followed ‘The_Decryptor’’s suggested link for ‘imageshack’, and found a very slow loading, small fonted, wide presentation. Not too nice. But why would that happen? Are some people actually using that form, and do they not know that it can be so much better, or is it sour grapes?
Curiously I wondered what would happen if I followed Handy Solo’s suggested link, but on seeing it I realised there was no point in generating a Safari rendering on what is already a Safari presentation. Doh! It’s only for non-Safari users, though it does seem not a simple exercise to see how it would turn out – though not too hard either.
Iv’e just had a look at the link provided by Kaustav, above, for ‘astrolondon’. I find it quite straightforward and simple to use. Mind you, I did not go too far into the various topics, though I did check the podcast which started straight away. Buffering is problaby my fault as it hesitated soon after, then played a few more seconds. I then elected to download the 14 minute podcast which was slow but I can listen to it later. Clicking on the ‘about’ tag at the top of the page, dropped down a pane which is really an ‘about me and my site’ display, complete with photo and URLs.
Quite effective. However there is a dearth of topics available, and the latest is months old, though it may be only a sample. I did not see the instruction to submit a URL so that it would respond with a Safari rendition. That seems to be what the aforementioned Handy Solo link was to do. Maybe I missed it.
Over the last couple of months, I did notice three other things though. The first was the message if a ‘double send’ of the comment was detected, and without doing anything, (save clicking off of it – this may be all that is necessary anyway), there is only one actual post. That is what it is all about – simplicity.
The second issue is that extra long URLs tend to not wraparound as normal text does, it just goes on into, or more correctly under, the right hand column. And the type-in box in the ad for the daily updates, just under Phil’s photo, also extends too far beyond the border. Examples of both can be found in the above blog, so there is at least one bug to zap.
Another issue has to do with this comment box. I like to use the ‘page up/down’ button, which used to work, but recently, and even now since the new version, even as I type this, the page button does a double-page shift, (in this box) and I have to chase it with the scroll button. (I will check further in case it is a wider problem in my Mac, but I don’t think so.)
Phew, Phil … well, you asked!
Ivan.
July 30th, 2006 at 3:04 pm
The body text of your main post and, oddly, the reply form are centered. They shouldn’t be.
July 30th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
There is a tag on the style sheet that justifies (left and right) the posts (not when they are on the main page, but just when you click on the permalink). I don’t like right hand justification; I prefer “ragged edge”, so I commented out the line, and it centered all the text! I’m not sure why; I’d have to dig through all the code to figure it out. For now, I turned justification back on. It should look fine now.
August 2nd, 2006 at 3:11 pm
PK said:
>As for the “constant naggingâ€: If IE would support the standard features for web browsing such as CSS and MathML, I wouldn’t care at all what other people use. But now I have to do bug fixing when I create a web site, because IE is years behind all the other browsers. Just give Firefox or Opera a try. It’s free, and you will probably like it.
GreyDuck Said:
>As for the constant nagging: Tabbed browsing really is the bee’s knees, but more importantly there’s something to be said for not using the #1 mechanism by which malware can land on your PC. Yes, it’s better than it used to be, but not good enough to make me comfortable using IE for anything other than using wholly trusted sites (like our company’s in-house tools).
Great reasons why one might wish to choose browsers. But I do a fair amount of my browsing from machines that I am not an administrator on. I cannot install software. Yea, IT department! So I am reduced to using what is available – IE. And I get tired of being berated for my “choice”. It’s tiresome. You like tabbed browsing – great for you. Microsoft sucks. We know this. I don’t need 200 people chanting at me. I get the picture.
September 17th, 2009 at 6:21 am
thancks
this post very very helped me !
Good Time