Of blogs and browsers

Learned a little more about the blog today, and browser compatibility.

I've been a fan of Mozilla and later Firefox for awhile now, but usually if a site will work well in only one browser, it will work in Internet Explorer. Consequently, I didn't realize until today that our sidebar wasn't loading properly in IE, when I happened to be on a friend's computer and saw it that way for the first time.

I thought something was wrong with the template, but got the same result with each one. Everything looked fine in Firefox and Mozilla, but messed up in IE.

I finally figured out it is because under our old template (which had a wider message area) there was room for the photographs as we laid them out using tables. Those same tables are wider than the message area in the newer templates, though, and that messes up the display in IE.

As it happens, those tables were designed to hold the photos that got lost when the computer crashed anyway, so I will probably just take those messages out altogether and repost the pictures later using newer software that is designed to ease the posting of photos to blogs.

Anyway, I thought it might be useful to those of you who view the site in a browser to know what's going on. If you're one of the 94% of computer users who use Internet Explorer, your viewing experience has been less than ideal since, probably, June. I have now fixed it so that IE views the site as well as Mozilla or Firefox--or, at least, I've fixed the main page and a couple of archives. For the rest of the archives, it's just too much work right now. I'll try to fix them as I have time, but in the meantime perhaps you'll understand why the formatting is not perfect.

And I apologize if you get this more than once--I may have inadvertently let it get out in e-mail earlier than it should have.

By the way, I would encourage you to try out Firefox and/or Mozilla. Both are free, both outperform IE (in my opinion), and both are more secure than IE (in my opinion). You don't have to uninstall IE (you can't!), and you can choose which one to have as your default browser, even if you install all three.