Squashing Bugs

A lazy weekend at the Longs’ house, being forced to use Internet Explorer 5.5, and a desire to practice what I preach has culminated in a few bug fixes for the site. It should now look a bit less sloppy in IE5. Read on for more.

Banner Border Off-By-One Pixel

The top 1-pixel border for the page would show up underneath the banner photo—an issue that’s been bugging (whoops…no pun intended) me since I implemented this design. With the use of some clever CSS hacking, I’ve resolved it. Essentially, when I stated that the top banner should be 69 pixels high with a 1-pixel border on the bottom, IE5 was including that border in the 69 pixel height. Instead, it should have been adding it to the height such that the border would show up below the banner photo (y-axis), not underneath it (z-axis). Mark Pilgrim has written a blog about relative font-sizes which includes a hack that I was able to use. You can read about it on Mark’s blog, but the code that I implemented is here:

Essentially what this code does is take advantage of one IE5 bug to correct another. When IE5 sees that voice-family: ""}""; /* IE5 Workaround */ line, it thinks that I’ve finished defining the #banner selector and moves on. All other browsers just read past this funny looking line and see that the height is changed back to 69px. Since CSS specifies that the last element in the list should be taken as the final setting, this “just works.”

XML Weather Hiccups

It was beat when the WeatherBox wouldn’t show the weather icon for the feed. It was bad when the WeatherBox would generate an XML error message. It was totally ridiculous when it started showing weather feeds for San Diego, CA. Anyway, I decided to point the feed at Dover, NJ rather than Wharton, NJ because Wharton doesn’t seem to carry condition information. I’ll also be optimizing the site in a few weeks to deal with the fact that InterceptVector really doesn’t need to get hit everytime someone hits my website.

Relative Font Sizing

If you resize the font to Larger or Smaller in IE, you will now see that the blog content changes accordingly. The sidebar content—for layout purposes—remains static.

General Validation Stuff

I broke a few things with my site validation when I was poking around. These have been fixed.

Feedback

I’m also considering a few more changes and welcome your feedback.

• Calendars: love ‘em or hate ‘em? I’m starting to think that they don’t contribute usefully to navigating the site and they’re a pain when it comes to layout.
• Center Column: Too small? I don’t think I mind reading the site on an 800×600 monitor, but I know Sarah’s made comments that the center column is too small for reading long articles.
• Anything else that can be done to make the site easier to read or more interesting?

Update: Just put in another quick fix for Opera—padding: 0px; in the body element of the stylesheet got rid of that troublesome white border that it was automatically rendering.