Even Closer
July 19th, 2008 by ComputerBob
If many parts of this site don’t look right to you, don’t worry.
I’m still working on getting WordPress to display correctly. I hope that everything will be all fixed and looking fine in the next few days. Thank you for your patience.
I was up until 4:30 this morning, visiting Browsershots.org over and over and over, trying to troubleshoot a CSS problem that was causing several of this site’s pages to display perfectly in Firefox 2 and 3, and in Internet Explorer 8, but caused those same pages to display this site’s header and footer, but not display its left navigation column or any of the page content when they were viewed in Windows Internet Explorer 6 and 7.
I think I finally got it solved about 30 seconds before I fell asleep. Two and a half hours later, my alarm went off, and it was time to feed my pets, take my meds, eat a healthy breakfast and start a new day.
I was able to catch a one-hour nap right before lunch time. Since then, I’ve worked on WordPress a little more, but I’m taking it very slow and easy, because as tired as I am, it would be really easy to make a small mistake that would affect a lot of pages — and I wouldn’t even realize it until later on, when it would be too late to remember what I had changed that had messed things up.
What I’m dealing with right now is that the default WordPress theme uses a slightly different CSS layout than the one that I use for the rest of this site.
The rest of this site uses a separate header div of a fixed width, sitting on top of a container div of that same width. Underneath the container div is a separate footer div, also of the same width. Inside the container div are the navigation column div, the main content div and the right sidebar div. All three divs inside the container are equal length, meaning that the background color or image of the shorter columns automatically “stretch” to match the length of the longest column. Here are the basic ideas that I adapted slightly to create this site’s 2-column layout and 3-column layout.
WordPress uses a similar, but different layout. It puts everything — the header, the page content, div, the right sidebar and the footer — all inside its container div. It’s a simpler structure, with easier-to-follow code than the rest of this site’s CSS layout.
But the default WordPress theme uses a plain white background in all of its columns, so it doesn’t need to have equal-length columns. In fact, I suspect that the default WordPress theme may not be able to create the equal-length columns that I need to use with my columns’ color and image backgrounds.
So at this point, it looks like I’m going to have to change WordPress to make it use the same CSS layout as the rest of this site. I sure don’t look forward to having to figure out how to make it happen. Maybe I’ll look at the underlying CSS code of a few of the popular 3-column WordPress themes and see how they get equal-length columns, to make sure that I’m doing it correctly.
Aren’t you glad that you don’t have to do all of this?
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Tags:
Coding, Internet, Personal, Pets, Software, Web Development, Windows