Saturday, May 05, 2007

Something is wrong with my blog template....

Something is wrong with my Blogger blog template and I'm trying to fix it. If you see weird things happening that's me trying to implement a fix!

I don't think it's anything to do with Blogger as the template in my other blog is identical and is fine. The main problem seems to be
  • a gap has opened up between the posts and the side bar but I don't know why
  • When the blog is viewed in Internet Explorer, you cannot see the whole side bar - which has dropped to the bottom of the page. (Please note this blog is always best viewed in Mozilla Firefox for no other reason that this platform understands Blogger code better than IE which doesn't. I've never ever regretted switching to Firefox and others who have also seem to feel the same way.)
  • unless I add in a bit of code, the current template suddenly started aligning all content in the side bar to the centre rather than the left of the side bar. This I can fix - but why is it doing it in the first place?
I've found some useful advice about how templates images which are too large for the content wrapper can cause the sidebar to drop to the bottom. You can find an article about it here on Blogger Forum - plus a fix! Note that this is not an official Google inspired Blogger forum but it does seem to have some useful advice in the Forum part of the site.

And something which may help - but is interesting anyway to anybody who designs in grids - is a post yesterday by a bloke called Matthew Pennell who has come up with a Grid Calculator which helps you how to work out how to stay within a width of 1024. Read his blog post about finding the right widths for column, gutter and page here.

Anybody who knows anything about how to fix this without me having to go back to the beginning and reinstall a template from scratch is welcome to chip in!

Links:

15 comments:

  1. OK - if I resave the template in Denim (the original template) the problem still exists. But if I save it to Minima then it goes away!

    So what to do..........????

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  2. Just a thought...would it by any chance have anything to do with the photos posted from your flickr account?

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  3. Thanks Susan. The problems started prior to that I think - but thanks for the thought - I'll keep it in mind

    I have found this site which provides blogspot.templates
    http://www.blogcrowds.com/

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  4. All the best with sorting it out Katherine. I have never seen that site before and will be keeping an eye on it. Thanks for the link.

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  5. Now I'm stuck because I'm back in the ludicrous problems of the last few days and can't access the layout page properly!

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  6. It must be frustrating! Another idea just crossed my mind, I noticed you have changed your code for your quotes. Could that be a possibility for mucking up your template?

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  7. !""££$%%^^&****( [lots of expletives deleted]

    Having sorted the template in Firefox I now find that it looks completely different in IE!!!!!

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  8. .........and hours later I'm back where I started.

    This is the point at which I start looking at other blogging platforms!

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  9. Hi Katherine,
    I played with the margins of the sidebar. Sometimes an entry wider than the sidebar width can cause this. But it seems not to be the case.
    I fear the best is to compare the template of your travel sketchblog with this one line by line. There must be a difference.
    May be you unintentionally damaged a tag in the side bar links or so.
    One missing "/div" may be.
    Another platform will not save you. I only recently repaired my templates as they looked terrible under firefox.
    Martin

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  10. I haven't had this happen in a while (as I now resize all my pics to one size -- 1000 pixels -- in their bigger direction), but I used to sometimes see this "sidebar at the bottom" behavior if one pic was "too wide." I wonder if that might be the issue?

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  11. Hi Orange - I think I'm resigned to going through the blog and clicking on every image until I find one which is too big. Not normally something which happens as they're all web-ready @72 dpi and resized so generally no bigger than 600 pixels on the longest side.

    I had various recent images reloaded yesterday - but no luck so far.

    I've also had the templates for both blogs copied over into notepad and then compared both to try and find differences - no luck there either!

    It's all very frustrating!

    I've added a 'best viewed in Firefox' to the blog description as the side bar is remaining stubbornly at the bottom of the blog in IE

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  12. Katherine when looking at some of your posts on their own in Internet Explorer I noticed that "One Mile from Home" finishes today! is messed up. That could be the post that is messing up your template?

    How I found that one was loading up each month. That month (April) with the "One Mile from Home" finishes today! post in it was the only one where your sidebar dropped to the bottom.

    Hope this helps!

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  13. Thank you so much Susan - I shall got and take a look when I've finished today's blog post. That sounds likely as I know it must have happened recently as I do a periodic check of what it looks like in IE.

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  14. Well done Susan - it worked!!! back to normal.

    I shall be happy to recommend you as blog glitch consultant!

    Thanks to everybody who tried to help - I faithfully followed all your suggestions and we got there in the end - such is the power of the blogosphere!

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  15. Chuckle....just glad it worked!

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