Comments on: Under the Hood

By: Tweaks | Cosmic Variance

Tweaks | Cosmic Variance — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 02:11:09 +0000

[...] Our crack team of blog experts has finally identified the problem that was causing the alignment problems in the latest version of Internet Explorer. So if you’ve stopped reading the blog because it didn’t look right, you can come back now! Of course, since you’re not reading this, you’ll never know. [...]

By: agoodspellr

agoodspellr — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 05:01:00 +0000

The left margin of the text in the sidebar (on the right) is offset too far to the left in IE7 here. Varying amounts under each heading.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 17:32:34 +0000

I just installed wp-cache, so we’ll see if that helps. Still working on the IE7 problem.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 18:03:35 +0000

Sharon, thanks! That’s the kind of specific advice that’s hard to come by on the internet. We’ll give it a try … sometime soon.

Phil, we get about 3,500 hits per day at the moment, ballooning of course when a monster site links to us. I’ll look into wp-cache, that also sounds like a good idea.

By: Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer

Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:02:23 +0000

Sean, what kind of traffic do yuo get on a given day? I’m curious, because I use BlueVirtual.com, and they have some good packages. I share my server with bautforum.com (the bulletin board for my site and for Universetoday.com) and so I got a dedicated server. It’s a lot more expensice but it rarely has problems.

WP can be a bit of a CPU hog because you send out each page dynamically. There is a WP plugin called wp-cache which caches the pages, and it has saved my blog many, many times when I get slashdotted. Seriously, go get it (it’s free) and install it. This will most likely solve your CPU woes.

By: Sharon

Sharon — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 13:58:14 +0000

Sean, there’s a ’secondary div ul’ class in the CSS which has a left margin of -40px. I have a strong suspicion that IE7 is using this for the margins in your sidebar classes sb_links, sb_about, etc. What I think you’ll need to do to fix it is to specify the margins for list elements in sb_links, sb_about, et al (they don’t seem to have anything defined at present). There might be another way, but that’s what I’ve done in the past with similar problems.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:23:34 +0000

Thanks, spyder. Thing is, I supect that our “CPU allocation exceeded” warnings are completely independent of the amount of traffic we get — it’s just a Bluehost snafu.

Thanks for the details about the IE7 problem, everyone. Obviously everyone should use Firefox, but just as obviously not everyone does — and I’m a believer that the content provider should at least make some reasonable effort to make their content readable to everyone.

By: spyder

spyder — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 18:02:34 +0000

Well, with Berube ceasing blogging as of this morning, that can only mean more traffic for quality sites such as this. More traffic will bring more Bluehost problems. And since i am one of those who are “sensible enough,” i haven’t really experienced any problems reading this site. Keep up all the good that is being done so well.

By: greg

greg — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:13:40 +0000

Is IE7 support really needed. I’m told that a lot of sights don’t support firefox or opera, not that i have ever needed to view such a sight. But why not the other way round?

I’m often told why I should use MS word or IE –one frequent reason is that “everything is compatable”. Why do we bend over backwards for issues that are in fact MS’s so that IE etc is “compatable”?

Pop up a link to firefox or something with the claim that this sight mite not display correctly in IE7.

By: John Phillips

John Phillips — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 11:19:10 +0000

All the right hand columns such as the ‘Recent comments’ overlaps into the blog proper, the ‘Contributors’ section more so than all other items. The ‘Contributors’ entry overlaps by approximately 9 characters and the others by 4 to 5 characters. All right hand column entries on and below the line “Comments on BLOG TITLE” completely loses the first 1 3/4 left hand characters characters of each line. This overlap defined as the number of characters to the left of the left hand edge of light grey vertical box housing the right hand columns The effect is exactly the same irrespective of what size browser window is used.