Okay, as far as I can figure out from this, any time you have an position: relative; outer element that wraps a position: absolute; inner element, then that inner element should find its offset relative to the outer element. Or something. 
The outer element looks like this:
#content {
position: relative;
clear: both;
border-left: 1px solid gray;
border-right: 1px solid gray;
margin: 0px 35px;
padding: 0px;
}
Again, the idea is that when I wrap this around an inner element that is positioned absolutely, any offset I use for the inner element should happen relative to the outer element. So, if I set top: 0px; in the inner element, it should position itself at the top of the outer element rather than the page itself. This works in all the browsers I’ve tested.
What doesn’t work is when I set right: 0px; in the inner element. Opera and Mozilla think that should be relative to the outer element. IE thinks it should relative to the page. I’m guessing by a vote of 2-to-1 that IE is wrong.
I tried to think hard of how to do this without using CSS hacks, but came to the inevitable conclusion that I had to hack the stylesheet. After consulting this page, I came up with this code for the inner element:
#right-column {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
margin: 10px 0px 0px 0px;
padding: 10px 5px 5px 5px;
width: 220px;
right: 36px; /* IE5 off-by-one to the R */
voice-family: ""}""; /* Hide from IE5 */
voice-family:inherit;
right: 35px;
right /**/: 0px; /* Hide from IE6 and correct margin */
}
The first hack, voice-family: ""}""; hides anything after that from IE5. Not surprisingly, the IE5 representation actually suffers from two bugs: the right margin thing as well as an off-by-one pixel error. Whee. So, I had to set another margin: 35px; after that to make it look right in IE6. After that was all said and done, I could finally set the margin back to what it was supposed to be and hide it from IE6 with right /**/: 0px;. As many have said before me, this CSS stuff is hard.
IE5 is still acting up quite a bit with my new menu on the top right of the screen, so more bug fixes will be forthcoming.
Nice. It looks identical in IE, Pricilla, Aquilla, and Mozilla…
Yeah, this is one more reason why I don’t have a blog;
I don’t have time to learn all this new coding and I’m
too much of a perfectionist to go with a template.
Then of course is the issue of time to write.
Hey K, here’s a remotely unrelated comment, bt I remember you saying you are running out of webspace. I was bored at work… wait, that’s not really news is it?…
Anyway, I was at the MT support forum and I came across a thread that basically would allow your pages to be generated on the fly- so they are not actually on the server as :00055.shtml: or whatever. It may be a “tweak for a weekend off” (for me it sure will be, I’m tired of playing in MT for a while… I think).
At any rate, it may be a viable eventual solution. Check it out-
http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=14&t=22652&s=6bf81c11535240d432f03eae05c19bdb
Jai, the idea seems quite appealing, actually. Unfortunately, I don’t think HTML code is what’s eating up my server space–it’s gotta be the photos.
I’ve been cleaning up my web space over the past couple weeks, removing the beta and senior project websites entirely. Unfortunately, this only cleared up a couple of MB. I am considering offloading my photos, but I really dig how much control I have over their presentation now.
Of course, then, there’s always the prospect of upgrading.
Wen you say “offloading” you mean like what I am doing with Becky’s Galleries? Pulling the photos from a different server? I can help you set up a photoblog if you want, it’s really not that difficult- though I’m not sure how much control you have now, and if the photoblog setup would be more limiting or not.
How does MIG import the photos? If it’s one at a time, than photoblog with “offloading” might work. Otherwise, maybe you can offload the whole MIG thing to another server – perhaps your home PC or something. Installing PERL is a breeze, as is PHP.
Maybe that helps
– BTW, love the CSS top nav. You always make simplicity look elegant! How? I wish I understood 
Jai, I know that there are photo-hosting services that exist (I think photos.msn.com is one of them), so I was thinking about that. But, I’ve recently put a lot of elbow grease into making Mig display my images *exactly* how I want them to. I don’t want the user to click on my photos link and feel like they’ve been swept away in some sort of Internet vortex–I want them to know that they’re still here.
The way Mig handles photos is great:
1. Size and color correct your photos in Photoshop.
2. Create thumbnails in Photoshop.
3. FTP to your site and create a new folder at ./photos/album/My_New_Album.
4. Upload your photos.
5. Create another folder at ./photos/album/My_New_Album/thumbs.
6. Upload your thumbnails.
All done.
As soon as you finish that, the images show up formatted how you want them in Mig. You can additionally add a comments file to describe each photo, which is a bit more elbow grease.
Right now, I have my entire Mig configuration imported to MovableType as templates, making rebuilding pages much easier. It also lets me edit the configuration and the *source code* right in MT (well, I copy it back and forth from a text editor to the MT form, anyway). I’m working on a way to add the comment files to MT as well.
All in all, it’s massively easier to get photos from my computer to the web, formatted the way I want. That alone might be worth the PlugSocket upgrade.
Tom, I feel your pain. Web design is not easy, especially for the perfectionist. Templates can also seem cliché as well. However, you may find it sufficient to pick a template and then evolve the design to your choosing. Ryan did this here:
http://www.flipsidejones.net
His design is a modified MT template, but it looks refreshed rather than tired.
As far as writing is concerned, well, blogging has a remarkable way of forcing you to make time.
Seriously, though, some of the best blogs I read are more sporadic than daily (I actually have a hard time keeping up with the daily bloggers).
Ahhh… very cool. So Mig somehow just takes files within a folder and creates pages out of that folder. That is a great idea. I wonder how I could recreate that in PHP or MT or both. RIght now, Beck’s site is driven off of entries, so each photo has it’s own entry. That’s not ideal, since it takes a good amount of time to put up ten pictures. How does Mig generate the captions?
And Tom, if you had a blog I would _so_ go to it!
Jai–exactly. As far as recreating it is concerned, why not just download it? It’s free, PHP-based, has a simple setup (just copy it to a folder on your server and then it works).
I know where you’re coming from as far as uploading files in MT is concerned–it’s a pain every time. That’s what got me looking for the software in the first place.
Captions are setup by putting an mt.cfg text file in your My_New_Album folder. There are custom tags that look like this:
<comment image=”dsc00043.jpg”>
This is my caption!
</comment>
I’ve hit some limitations with the software that I’m going to either hack or ask the development team to implement. I’m also kicking around blogging about this whole experience.
You’ve probably already covered this, in fact, i seem to remember posting about it briefly, but have you looked at solutions like gallery (gallery.sf.net)?
It will do all the thumb nail work for you. The zphoto software I use with zope handles all those aspects of it as well.
You can also mass import to both of them, and gallery actually has a java client so you can do all your work from not-a-web-browser is you want to (its web interface just dandy too though).
Altp.
Hey Mike. Yeah, we had talked about it here:
http://www.kennsarah.net/archives/000286.shtml#000478
Gallery wanted the latest version of software that I couldn’t install at my service provider.
Photoshop does just fine on the thumbnails–all I do is point it at the folder that I want to turn into thumbnails, fill out a form and click Start. Whoosh. No big deal.
Gallery does look like great software, but I’m quite pleased with Mig.
Ken, I know this is a bit rude…but how much is your hosting?
The reason I ask is that I have a little “side business” and we do some hosting along with some development and stuff.
If you’re running into some limitations, perhaps I could interest you in a change of hosts.
If it sounds interesting, email me and we can chat about it.
(BTW — I like this CSS idea)