A New Theme
I’ve implemented a significantly revised theme here on Mokka mit Schlag. The main change was switching to a Holy Grail style of positioning. This works much better on Safari, and somewhat better on Firefox. However the big change was removing the Google adds from the sidebar. They likely will return at some point. However, the revelation that finally enabled me to fix the Safari problems was that it was precisely the AdSense iframe that was getting in my way.
There are still a few tweaks I have to make here and there. In particular I need to validate the XHTML since WordPress is pretty cavalier about that. I also need to fix some fonts in the headers, and remove a few more vestigial CSS rules. It wouldn’t hurt to change the names of the CSS classes to something more semantic than left, right, and center. Since I don’t really use the left margin at all, maybe I can delete that extra div. Finally I need to figure out how to put the AdSense ads back in without breaking everything. Then, if all is well, I’ll install the new theme on The Cafes too.
If you notice any problems, please send me e-mail about them or comment here. I’m particularly interested in hearing from IE users since I haven’t yet even looked at the site in IE.
September 25th, 2006 at 10:27 AM
I’m using the wonderful IE Tab extension for Firefox/Win32, which lets you flipflop between Gecko and IE-in-a-tab with a single click, or (as in this case) open a page using both rendering engines in side-by-side tabs.
There is a serious problem with the IE version: no headline! It just vanishes.
Less significantly, the guillemets before the sidebar items don’t show up in IE, and the long item “Software Development (16)” does not wrap the “(16)’ but sticks out beyond the border.
In both renderers, the “Mokka mit Schlag” banner looks terrible when (as in this post viewed on my screen) it wraps. There is a huge amount of negative leading between the lines, so much that the top of the “B” in “Blogging” is approximately at the x-height of the line above, overlapping the “la” in “Schlag”.
And while you’re dinking with things, can you please enable comment previewing, and get with the program and use Atom 1.0 instead of the obsolete 0.3 version? Thanks.
September 25th, 2006 at 10:35 AM
At this point supporting Atom 1.0 Essentially requires forking WordPress. The WordPress junta are very resistant to all things Atom. Several people have submitted patches for this that have gone nowhere. It’s a miracle there’s Atom 0.3 support in WordPress at all. I use WordPress because the front end has some very nice features (like themability) but the back end is extremely weak.
September 25th, 2006 at 11:44 AM
I think I’ve partially fixed the line height problem that caused overlapping text. Some text may still be cut off, though. What I really need is a way to dynamically adjust the font-size so that it shrinks as necessary to fit the available box. I don’t think CSS offers me that option, though.
September 25th, 2006 at 2:06 PM
I’ve fixed the problem where the page heading wasn’t showing up in IE. It still looks a little funky there, but I think I can live with the remaining issues. I am curious to know if this page looks OK in IE7 which should have at least somewhat improved CSS support.
September 26th, 2006 at 10:32 AM
Supporting Atom 1.0 in WordPress is as simple, these days, as installing a plugin: http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/wordpress-atom-1.0/
If you want to take it a step further, there is now also an Atom Publishing Protocol implementation for WordPress,
thanks to Elias Torres: http://torrez.us/archives/2006/08/21/486/
September 26th, 2006 at 7:14 PM
http://browsershots.org/ is a handy tool for checking out pages in other browsers. I don’t currently have a computer running Windows, so I check there from time to time to see if anything extra goofy is going on.