surveyor of the foothills, valleys and occasional sheer cliff drops of the world of computer programming…
( October 31, 2006 at 5:18 pm) · Filed under general
, plugins , wordpress
Paolo has been kind enough to translate into Italian an article I wrote detailing how to put together a simple wordpress plugin. The translation may be found here, and I have added the text to the article itself at the end. Thank you for your hard work; I only know a little Italian but it looks good to me & I’m pleased that its available to a wider audience.
( October 30, 2006 at 11:03 am) · Filed under browsers , css , debugging , msie6 , msie7 , wordpress
As I noted earlier, while IE6 displayed this site (in Nearly-Sprung) correctly, IE7 did not.
The reason is this: the bug in IE6 and previous that allowed the following CSS hack to work
* html .anelement { layout fixes }
has been fixed in IE7. However, many of the layout issues that were fixed in the escaped code have NOT been fixed. In my case the particular culprits were these:
/* Essential Layout (IE Fix) */
* html #leftsidebar {
left: 150px; /* RC fullwidth */
}
/* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
* html li {height: 1%;}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */
/* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
* html #postnavigation {width: 145px; height: 2px;}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */
IE7, like IE6, needs the left: setting, but as it no longer works with the * html escape (for an explanation of why this is, see the excellent article here) it is not getting these settings as it should. The result on my site was the left sidebar’s utter disappearance.
The workaround is to isolate the IE hacks into a separate .css file and call it with an escape that all IE derivatives still honor. (Wonder how long this escape will last…) While tedious, this is overall a better solution than embedding hacks within a css file. Such hacks can be relegated to a separate file which can later be removed when IE is finally fixed (these glasses seem awfully pink, don’t they?).
So, in general this is the way to fix such problems. I checked my css files for any instances of
* html
Some of these might be in a “holly hack,” which should be moved along with the rest of the markup.
I created a new css file, iehacks.css is fine, and dumped all the hacks into this file. Now, I removed all instances of * html (this is the crucial part, otherwise no improvement is seen for IE7). In my case, this new file wound up containing the following:
#leftsidebar {
left: 150px; /* RC fullwidth */
}
/* holly hacks to fix peekabo bugs in IE */
/* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
li {
height: 1%;
}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */
/* Hides from IE5-mac \*/
#postnavigation {
width: 145px; height: 2px;
}
/* End hide from IE5-mac */
(Note the holly hacks in the last two rules.) Now, I needed to modify my <head> element to include this css file, which was easily done via adding
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="iehacks.css" />
<![endif]-->
In WordPress, this meant modifying my header.php file (of course I made a backup copy of it first) as follows:
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_directory'); ?>/iehacks.css" />
<![endif]-->
I added this just before the call to wp_head. This would make a VERY simple plugin; I could create one if people wish. But this is pretty straightforward as is.
Update
Probably the best way to do this, allowing for testing in IE7 before proceeding completely, is to copy the suspect elements over to the new css file. Since IE7 doesn’t work with the current css file anyway, it doesn’t hurt to leave the elements in place while getting the iehacks file to work. Add the [if IE] call to the headers and check in IE6, IE7. Once everything looks okay, then remove the suspect elements from the original css file, one by one.
( October 29, 2006 at 11:44 pm) · Filed under applications , browsers , firefox , msie7 , ubuntu , wordpress
Seems everything’s updating all at once –
Updated to this at work, no problems. Seems to be running just fine. I’ve snagged the standalone version for 6.0 so that I should be able to continue with testing/development on both. Sigh. Not quite at the point of setting up multiboot between XP and Vista, but we’ll see.
Update on my Windows machine, no problems. Looks VERY nice. I appreciate the tabbing features except for the fall-off scrolling at both ends. I was prepared to hate the close tabs, but they only show up once the tab is active, which means I don’t hit them by accident the way I used to when I tried an older extension. I love the integration with the various feed readers, I was able to remove the Bloglines button and with the MiniMenu extension save some serious real estate on the top. Will be nice to upgrade to 2.0 on my laptop, where the real estate would really be handy.
I had no trouble with upgrading from Hoary to Dapper, but a friend did. So this time ’round I’m sitting out the upgrade for a little while. And it sounds like Edgy has some rough spots, so I’m in no hurry. A fresh install may work better than an update over Dapper, but I’ll monitor it for a while longer.
Important security upgrade, you should do it — here and also here. It only takes a few seconds to upgrade if you use Mark’s diff zip file, which I did. Even with the potential bug (which he has a fix for), I would go ahead and update. Keep an eye on Mark’s blog for more info on 2.0.5.
( October 26, 2006 at 10:36 am) · Filed under applications , browsers , compatibility , debugging , general , msie6 , msie7 , wordpress
Roger Johansson (of 456 Berea Street) and Lorelle VanFossen both remind us that the new Internet Explorer has been released into the wild and what does that mean for all our web pages?
I want to point out that Internet Explorer really has three main versions right now. (I have to support multiple platforms, so this sort of thing is a large concern for me). IE7 is intended only for XP and Vista. Anyone who has not migrated to either of these platforms will use IE6. Since Win2K is pretty decent, and there’s a lot of people out there who haven’t bothered to shell out for the bigger badder etc computer, I expect that the web pages I work on will continue to have a substantial proportion of IE6 users. So the IE6 bugs remain a real and ongoing concertn.
In testing with IE7, we have noticed that there can be different behavior between IE7 on XP and IE7 on Vista! Now, some of this may be due to the different beta versions of Vista — I believe we’ve gone through at least two updates on Vista beta. However the possibility remains very high that IE7XP and IE7Vista will behave differently from each other as well.
So now that means three platforms to support in place of one!
In any case I’m aware that IE7 does not handle this website gracefully even though IE6 does, as you can see in this screen shot.
( October 9, 2006 at 10:14 am) · Filed under applications , google
So I got some email over the weekend from an old friend back in grad school days, which was a pleasant surprise. I asked him how he found me this time ’round, and he pointed this out:
Actually, I was playing with Google’s new code search. After the obvious vanity search and a couple others, I tried this which lead to your blog. It turns out that their code search is an awesome way of finding lost programmers.
Google keeps pulling new bunnies out of that magic search hat. Searches based on publicly available/published code is a pretty cool concept…
Bad Behavior has blocked 751 access attempts in the last 7 days.
