launch early and often

Now that I’ve got this site launched, maybe I should take a closer look at it. I’m told in the comments that layout is broken in IE6. I have dealt with an IE bug like this before and ended up creating an alternate css file just for IE and just for one div. I may end up doing that here too. I was going to try the display:inline trick, but the css already uses that and it doesn’t seem to be working. I tried a couple of other tricks but was denied. Maybe if I wasn’t at the airport about to hop a flight, I’d have more time to dig into the details, but I guess it’ll have to stay broken a bit longer. Sorry IE6 users! If you are reading this and thinking to yourself, that Vanessa is so lame and that fix is so easy, please drop a note in the comments and I’ll check it out when I land. The “fix is so easy” comment that is.

Other broken things:

  • The comments feed didn’t seem to be working in my feed reader. It’s fixed now (er, I was subscribed to the wrong thing I think), but now I’m thinking about that Search Engine Land article about owning your feed URL again and maybe I should do the MyBrand thing. Because even with the WordPress plugin, I’m using a Feedburner domain for the feed, which doesn’t seem ideal. Alas, that too will have to wait until I land.
  • The link to the theme in the footer was broken. (And if the owner of that site logs into webmaster tools, they’ll be wondering where the heck that broken link is coming from!) That was an easy fix at least.
  • The feed URLs in my header don’t match the links in the sidebar (the header URLs are the original; the sidebar URLs from feedburner). This means that if you pop my domain into a feed reader, it finds two versions of each feed. Again, not ideal. Will fix that when I do the MyBrand thing. Er, maybe tomorrow.
  • I’ve got all these meta tags:
    <meta name="distribution" content="global" />
    <meta name="robots" content="follow, all" />
    <meta name="language" content="en, sv" />
    <meta name="distribution" content="global" />
    <meta name="robots" content="follow, all" />
    <meta name="language" content="en, sv" />

    Hmm. For one thing, everything is there twice. For another thing, I’m not thinking I need most of these tags even once. I’m also not sure why my content is specified as Swedish. I definitely don’t need to tell the robots to follow all. They’re pretty good at doing that on their own. Anyway, I just need to track down how these are being generated and fix ‘em up.

  • This isn’t broken, but I’m thinking of moving by blogroll from the sidebar to a tab, so you don’t have to see it on every page. Especially as it might get longer over time. I do read a lot, after all.
  • Someone asked for pictures. That’s what the Flickr feed at the end is for! No, not those kinds of pictures.
  • Someone in the comments was questioning the seagull. Don’t be hating on the seagull! That’s not really a broken thing to fix. I just wanted to represent for the poor little guy.

In my hasty testing, what have I missed?

7 Comments to "launch early and often"

  1. wreilly on 11 April, 2007

    Hi Vanessa,

    Try reducing the width of the left DIV ( content )until the right side comes up along side the content. You will probably have to juggle the margins too.

    I run IE6 in a VMWare virtual machine just for things like this but I always use Firefox first and then fix stuff in IE. Also check this out:

    http://www.quirksmode.org/css/quirksmode.html

    Bill

  2. wreilly on 11 April, 2007

    Oh, and put a background color on all of the div in your CSS then you can see where the margins are.

    Bill

  3. wreilly on 11 April, 2007

    For the time being take your email out of the sidebar, I think it is streching the sidebar width.

    Remove the display: inline; from the sidebar div.

    Put this after the content div:

    Put this in your CSS file:

    clear {
    clear:both;
    margin:0;
    padding:0;
    }

    Then set the margins ( all ) on the sidebar and content divs to zero.

    Reduce the width on the content by say 30%. The side bar should pop up next to the content. Now you wil have to fiddle with the margins and width.

    IE6 doubles the size of floated right divs too.

    This quirks mode stuff is confusing and frustrating but you will probably have nearly as many people using IE6 as Firefox and IE7 combined.

    Hope this helps
    Bill

  4. wreilly on 11 April, 2007

    Hmmm,

    Put this after the content div:

  5. wreilly on 11 April, 2007

    Wordpress is removing the html so take out the extra spaces and dashes in this:

    Put this after the content div:

  6. wreilly on 11 April, 2007

    Ok last time ;-)

    div
    class=

    “clear”

    /div

    You know what to do…

    Bill

  7. [...] back to my tweaking. I did find where those extraneous meta tags were being generated. And they weren’t so much being generated as just hanging out in the [...]

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