Tweaking my own blog and making other people’s themes work with what I want is some really tedious, boring, downright confusing, harrowing, fun stuff. As many of you may notice, bit by bit I’m adding features to this website to make it work and look the way I want it to. Maximum readability, uniqueness, pleasing layout, intuitive navigation, and usefulness for both myself and my readers. Last week, a weird bug popped up, which I promptly fixed, but this week, a similar one happened, and I had to dive into the code again. But then I realized that all this time, I had been checking the way it looked in the Firefox browser. And when I checked it in Internet Explorer… Oh hell. Everything was everywhere it wasn’t supposed to be.
I spent a good three hours yesterday cleaning it up, tweaking the CSS file and parts of the PHP code (all of this I have been learning about as I go) to make it work in both browsers. A small part of the problem is I don’t have formal training in web editing, so the bits I put in here and there may or may not do what I think they will. If you logged on between 5:30-8:30 central time yesterday, you might have seen some weird stuff. Text going everywhere and then five minutes later text going nowhere, etc.
But the biggest problem is that Internet Explorer and Firefox generate websites differently. So what lines up perfectly in one browser may be slightly off in another. My previous theme, as harsh as it was to look at, was full of little bug fixes put in by the guy who made it, each one with a tiny explanation such as “for some reason IE needs this to keep from chopping this part off”. If you’ll load my website with both Firefox and IE, you’ll notice slight differences in the positions of the images and such. Bottom line, Internet Explorer SUCKS. I encourage you, if you use IE, ditch it and download Firefox. You won’t regret it. It runs more smoothly, displays websites better (except some Microsoft sites, go figure), and is much more secure.
Because of the minor differences between the browsers, I will always make sure that my website displays properly (and the best) in Firefox, but IE is likely to have a few little bugs with the way it looks. I will make sure that it works in both of these browsers.
About 65% of my readers use windows computers, and only 46% use IE. A bit more than 22% percent of total readers are viewing with Firefox, which can be on both PCs and Macs. Macintosh users number at 12%, but only 4% of my readers are using Safari (Does it look ok?), which means that most Mac users are using another browser, such as Firefox. There are a whole bunch of unknown computer types and a few unknown browsers, but I think it’s safe to say that if I take care of how it looks in IE and firefox, I’ll be doing the most I can with the time I have. There are a bunch of ways to read my site, including through RSS feeds and syndicated through LJ and other places (yeah someone set it up to reprint there, weird.) ‘Course many of these just lead back to here so the home formatting is still an issue.
I’m still working on a few navigational aids - such as “next/prev posts” when you search or browse categories. Seriously, whoever made this cool looking theme spent way more time adding stupid ads at the bottom than making it a particularly navigable wordpress theme. So much of the code is now mine that I’ll soon rename it, and perhaps package it up as a theme for other folks to use. More to come!
I’ve also added another image to the rotating images. That was when I was buying my new truck!
