influenced dot net

I’ve been having a lot of trouble trying to get my layout to look the way I want it. The following image shows what I was aiming for:

Description of image:

• content_container is just a default div with margins such that it’s centered
• There are multiple article div’s, each just a default div
• There is one article_icon div per article, it’s floated left
• #right1 is a right floated div inside #content_container
• #right2 is a right floated div inside #content_container, it has clear: right set so that it appears beneath #right1.. it’s about half the width of #right1

Unfortunately whenever I tried this, adding a clear:right to the second right float would cause the left float to move downwards on FF and Opera but IE still rendered alright.

In the end I’ve now stuck both the right floats into a single right float, i.e. so there’s no need for a clear: right, which works but doesn’t look as good…

Unfortunately, I’ve been really busy with other things and this site has been pushed towards the back of the pile.

Today though I’ve implemented Adsense and got it working with my application/xml serving to capable clients via this tutorial. One bad thing is that it seems to have broken my layout slightly in Firefox which I will need to look at in the near future.

I really need to implement a menu and a proper backend system instead of currently entering raw SQL commands into my DB!

I have added some forums, they are in their stock state at the moment and will remain so until I can get round to doing some configuration.

The URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/InfluencedDotNet and it should work in any feed reader.

I’ve also created a ‘site todo list’ for this site, which can be viewed here

Edit: oh and start.com/developer, ‘details coming on september 13th, 2005′ – /me still waiting

I have stuck my daily del.icio.us links in a floated sidebar.. it seems to work alright but there’s extra space to the right of it in IE & I don’t know why yet..

Note to self: need to create cache dir for magpie

I’m using Dean Allen’s classTextile.php (well – a bug fixed version available from the “textpattern weblog”:http://textpattern.com/weblog/, but I don’t know if I’m using it wrong as I keep running into niggling issues…

e.g. I type:

I can’t even get it to format this properly!!!!!!!!

I am now using Markdown.php due to Textile quirks which annoy me (crap handling of preformatted text, inability to fully disable Textiles parsing in certain places, etc…)

One Markdown problem I’ve already encountered is lack of strikethrough, as you can see I needed it for this post!

It can be overcome by using the following though:

<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">

Due to the way Textile handles lists (at least the Textpattern implementation of it), a list may only be line after line of list items, i.e. you cannot have a paragraph after each bullet point, etc.

I need to look into this further

First blog body

This is a test

[imported from Bloglines]

I have just ordered a few books from Amazon:

(in no particular order)

• “The ZEN of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web”Dave Shea; Paperback
• “Bulletproof Web Design: Creating Flexibility with XHTML and CSS”Dan Cederholm; Paperback
• The Art of Project Management”Scott Berkun; Paperback
• “Professional CSS”Christopher Schmitt; Paperback
• “Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook”Dan Cederholm; Paperback

[imported from Bloglines]

Creating a good, standards compliant layout that works across browsers is very difficult.

I was having trouble understanding why absolute positioning wasn’t working relative to a container I had.. you have to set the containers position to relative because the position is calculated using the “nearest positioned ancestor”

http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#propdef-position

Quote:
9.8.4 Absolute positioning

Finally, we consider the effect of absolute positioning. Consider the following CSS declarations for outer and inner:

#outer {
position: absolute;
top: 200px; left: 200px;
width: 200px;
color: red;
}

#inner { color: blue }

which cause the top of the outer box to be positioned with respect to its containing block. The containing block for a positioned box is established by the nearest positioned ancestor (or, if none exists, the initial containing block, as in our example). The top side of the outer box is ’200px’ below the top of the containing block and the left side is ’200px’ from the left side. The child box of outer is flowed normally with respect to its parent.