There’s some weird bug that’s popped up here that is messing up the colors on the blog as you scroll down. I’ll have to dig around and figure it out, but it may take me a while. I’m much better at creating bugs than fixing them.
In the meantime, it somehow slipped my mind to link to the December 20, 2006 episode of "Are We Alone"? from the SETI Institute (scroll down to find it on that page). In this episode, Seth, Molly, and I talk to Matthew Fenton, author of Exploring the Unexplained, a reasonably skeptical book about silliness like alien abductions, crop circles, and the Roswell UFO incident. Give it a listen while I figure out what I’ll write about next from the AAS meeting!
January 10th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Yeah, I’ve been seeing that on long entries, or on the main page for several months now.
January 10th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
I’m pretty sure it started when you upgraded the blog software. Usually it’s just the comments that go off the edge, but that last post was enormous!
January 10th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
I thought you were working on a new look for the site? Did that get put on the shelf?
January 10th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Black text on a dark blue background for both Firefox and Opera
At first I thought that my screen resolution may have been the problem, as I had just gotten a new monitor.
January 10th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Mozilla and Firefox had been doing something similar ever since you upgraded. Usually it eventually disappears as it takes awhile for the white to come on down.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:00 pm
I upgraded the blog. When that happens, files get replaced, and if they have been modified, the changes get overwritten. Irritating, but it happens. I’ll be looking into it as soon as I can.
January 10th, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Roswell…never heard of it. Perhaps I’ll listen.
January 10th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Ah, that’s why this isn’t happening to me. I use IE7 most of the time. I only use Firefox when IE does something really stupid. And for Stumble when I get really bored:).
January 10th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
It happens in Konqueror, too. Perhaps the blog software is doing something IE-specific that messes up standards-compliant browsers.
January 10th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
Safari as well. I first noticed it about a week ago.
January 11th, 2007 at 2:24 am
It seems to be working now.
January 11th, 2007 at 3:26 am
You should definitely use version control. CVS and subversion are both excellent tools, although subversion is newer and sexier. You add you wordpress code to a repository, then you get the new wordpress release and check that in as a branch and the you merge the branches. Once you have resolved all conflicts you have a new system with the latest version of wordpress and your own tinkering. And you will have a historic record of all edits.
January 11th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I went to that Seti site and clicked on the wrong link and spent an interesting 50 odd minutes listening to the programme about chimps and Bonobos. Could be worth a listen even if it does not have Phil.
January 11th, 2007 at 6:00 pm
Hey Phil, I’m fighting HTML and CSS at the moment and always seem to come across these sorts of issues! Hence I hope the following is helpful to you.
Your problem is that your individual post pages have been truncated at some point recently: they are currently missing the body and html end tags as well as the all important footer div. It’s all important because it includes the attribute clear:both.
In standards-based browsers (e.g. Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konquerer, etc) you’ll notice the white background is stopping at the end of the righthand sidebar. If the content is longer than that sidebar, it will overflow the white background into the blue background of the body. This is because the right sidebar is the only fixed section of the page; the left sidebar and the content are floating. The clear:both attribute in effect restarts the fixed content of the page after the end of the floating objects. Floats can be powerful, but they can also give you one hell of a headache.
I can’t remember if your individual post pages had the same footer as on the main page, but I suspect so. At the very least you’ll need a div with a clear:both style attribute in your html code after the end tag of the sidebar div but before the end tag of the page div (the footer div has clear:both as one of its attributes already, which is why it does the job on the main page).
Keep up the good work!
January 11th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
Phil, change of subject, and hope that this reaches you so that you can promulgate it. While you were in Seattle, you were just a few miles north of a bedroom community of Federal Way, which desperately needs some insight and guidance. The school board has said that if Gore’s DVD is shown in the classroom, time must be allotted for “opposing views” (of any kook in the neighborhood). This originated with a parent who thinks the earth is 14,000 years old. Speak up or the dumbest among us will be given more air time than they ever deserve. Surely this is not what Andy Warhol hoped for. Link to story:
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/011107EA.shtml