Grrrr Blogger (oops) Grrrr IE7

So I was all set to get cracking a a series of new security related posts.

For reasons I'm not sure about, I opened up my blog's page in Internet Explorer 7, instead of my preferred Firefox.

I was shocked.

Gone were the pretty dual-columns on the right hand side.

It was all a single column stretching downward.

I flipped Firefox open at it looked normal with the dual side-columns displaying nicely.

I didn't recall making any changes to the side-column, except adding in a new link for Secunia's Secunia Software Inspector. Maybe I blew something out.

So for the next four hours I have been tweaking and playing and messing with the template. All to no avail. I even downloaded Opera (portable) to see how it was rendering there as well.

Firefox and Opera were rendering the template just fine...IE7 was not.

I'll save you the details...but I eventually traced the problem to this post. It was the formatting of the leading quote causing (invisible) intrusion into the side-bar area. That then forced them to display as a single column. Once I dropped the font-size down a bit, IE7 stopped misbehaving and all was well again.

Whew.

Lesson learned? If you use a custom Blogger template, and it utilizes "float" settings...even if they are (for all practical purposes) fixed, all it takes is an oversize photo, or element, or text that exceeds the element's width to shove the other elements out of the way. It appears to be just an IE thing as Firefox and Opera didn't bat an eye.

New Label Cloud.

I've been unhappy with the length of my default Blogger label widget item. It just seemed too long and forced other side-bar content down the side.

One solution would be to code the element to reduce the line spacing. I didn't really like this idea.

So I tried the Code for Beta Blogger Label Cloud hack instead after finding a few in use that looked pretty good.

It was a quick modification and I am much more pleased with the results now.

Only, stupid IE7 still is messing with the rendering again.

If you look at it in Firefox or Opera...it looks centered and spread out in its column space.

If you look at it in IE 7...it looks centered, but is shoved to the right of its column space.

It's not that big a deal to care about trying to change it now.

I've also changed the hot-links in my blog header. One is now a link to RSS feed this blog. The other is a link to Mozilla's Firefox/Thunderbird download site.

I know the "profile" and "archive" links are working yet....that will be another day.

--Claus