Blueberry Muffins

I’ve been doing a little bit of work under the hood around here, lately. My instincts were correct, and IE’s massive pooch-screwing on my navigational buttons was due to the whitespace parsing error.

I brought the index pages of all sections (About, AV, Slapdash, etc.) under the wing of my new stylesheet trio. All pages used to reference one stylesheet, wildwest.css, for design and layout. Along with the main index and all weblog pages, they now reference three stylesheets that each contain different groups of elements to make maintenance chores easier.

global.css contains the style rules for all global HTML tags (<body>, <h1>, <p>, <img>, etc.)

layout.css contains style rules for all my layout <div id=" "> tags, such as #header, #navigation and #content.

styles.css contains style rules for any <div class=" "> tags and anything else that is not global or layout, but is style nevertheless.

A new problem that has come to my attention is that IE grossly farks up the layout when I use the {float: right;} element in the “content” layout <div>. I often use this in my weblog to make images float alongside text, but apparently I need to come up with another solution if I want to accomodate the painfully crippled browser used by 93 percent of the internet community.

I revamped some of my .PHP code, replacing <? include ‘nav.php’; ?> with <? @ require_once (“/i/nav.inc”) ?>. This keeps all of my scripted navigation files in one includes directory, and makes sure the same navigation won’t accidentally be included in the same page twice. It’s super basic, but it’s all I know and all I need at the moment. I’m still overjoyed at the ability to edit one navigation file and watch hundreds of my subpages update automatically, but soon I think I’ll find myself building my own barebones content management system with PHP and XML. I want something that will let me script out super basic things, like page titles, navigation and imported stylesheets, and rebuild all files in a form similar to that available in the Movable Type interface. Something that allows me complete and lazy control.

Whatevs. It’s a beautiful day and I’m gonna go play outside.

Personally, IE is a “Necessary Evil” (TM) that should be ignored whenever possible. Microsoft can’t make a working browser, those who use it need to be punished for thier incompetence.
(Written using IE 6.0)

Since I don’t have my own weblog (well, I do, but no one reads it), I will post my thoughts here. We, as wealthy Americans, need a new kind of reality TV. Not the same old crap where people try to fall in love of eat insects to remain in the game. No, this is much, much bigger.
We need Obesity Challenge. This December, 24 guests from across the United States compete in a contest like no other. They try, for one million dollars, to outeat, outweigh and outtrample the other players. Play along and see how much weight you can gain, how many airline seats you can fill, and how many elephants you can bring to their knees with Obesity Challenge: America.