Woohoo!!! Can I Sleep Now?
July 21st, 2008 by ComputerBob
About 11:00 this morning, I finally solved what I think was the last problem I was having with WordPress displaying as part of this site.
I’ve been tracking down hunches and spending hours and hours doing trial-and-error for the past several days and nights, but in the end, it all came down to just one thing: I had to change the CSS layout that WordPress uses, to make it the same as the 2-column and 3-column CSS layouts that I use on the non-WordPress parts of this site.
That meant that I had to take my header and my footer out of the WordPress page-wrapper div and format them as separate divs, above and below the WordPress page-wrapper div.
Through the past several days of many, many CSS conflicts, I finally discovered that there was just no way that things were going to work correctly in Microsoft’s browsers until I changed WordPress’s entire underlying CSS layout. Once I finally did that, everything started snapping into place the way it’s supposed to.
For the benefit of anyone who might be trying to get WordPress to “fit into” their web site, using a fixed-width, CSS, 2 or 3 equal-length column layout with background colors or images in the columns, the problem that you’re going to run into with the WordPress default theme’s CSS layout is that everything will look fine in Firefox and Internet Explorer 8, but when you view certain pages in Internet Explorer 6 or 7, your footer div will mysteriously display way up in the middle of your content div, instead of behaving itself and displaying underneath your 2 or 3 columns. And there’s nothing that you’re going to be able to do about it. Nothing. Believe me, I know.
Regular readers of this Journal know that It’s been an extremely frustrating problem that became a virtuallly maddening problem (pun intended) when the only tool at my disposal to see how my site looked in IE6 and IE7 was the Browsershots.org web site. Even when that site is not busy, it takes a minimum of 2-3 minutes to show you one screenshot. But depending on how busy it is, it can take up to 25 minutes just to finally show one screenshot of one web page in one browser. If that screenshot doesn’t look right, then you change something in your CSS code and resubmit it to Browsershots — and wait up to another 25 minutes to see if that changed anything (or like yesterday, you wait up to 25 minutes, only to have it tell you that it has either timed-out or failed to create a screenshot for you.
It made me feel like a guy who was trying to walk to a friend’s house about 10 miles away. By itself, that task would be a formidable one in the heat of the Sunshine State, but it would be almost impossible if someone were to put a hood over your head so that you’d have to walk without seeing where you were going — except that, every 20 minutes or so, they would take the hood off and let you look in only one direction, without turning your head, for just a few seconds, to see if you could figure out where you were. Then you’d trudge onward, hoping that you weren’t just wasting your time stumbling in the wrong direction.
It would probably be a miracle if you ever found your way to your friend’s house.
This morning, after stumbling for the past several weeks, I finally found the way to my friend’s house. Oh, man, I should have called — I hope he’s home.
Anyway, once I got things fixed in IE6 and IE7 (I can still hardly believe that I actually did it!), then I worked on about 40 different minor WordPress formatting tasks that I had written onto Post-It notes stuck that covered the entire front of my desk.
Please leave a comment and let me know if you see any major problems.
I’m so energized, I feel like running a couple of miles. But I’m so tired, I feel like sleeping for a couple of days.
I hope that, starting tomorrow, I’ll be able to start writing about things other than WordPress again.
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Tags:
Inspirational, Internet, Microsoft, Personal, Software, Web Development, Windows