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And when I say “mine”, I mean “faithful reader Doug Mayo-Wells'”. Because Doug did what I couldn’t do: figure out a way to fix the annoying bug where graphics would get pushed way down to the bottom of the left-hand nav bar, leaving acres of blank space for those who look at the site in smallish monitors on IE. His fix had the added bonus of preventing Firefox from squishing the graphics to the width of the browser window. The only downside is that the fix involves adding a bit of code to most of the entries on the site; I’ve updated all the posts from October, and will be working my way through the back catalog in the next few days, so if you still see the bug on older pages, don’t panic: help is on the way.

As should be clear by now, Doug strides the earth as a god among mere mortals; you should check out his Web and interactive media consulting and Web hosting services, along with Pathetic Caverns, where he offers his “eclectic reviews and opinions.”

With this fix, I hearby declare the new template to be fixed. There is only one other significant bug that I’ve been informed of, and it’s something of a doozy: for puzzling reasons, some users are only seeing every other comment (and the “missing” comments aren’t numbered, so that, for instance, what is really comment #3 appears to them as comment #2). As near as I can tell, the people seeing this bug are using Internet Explorer on a Mac. Thought I hate to be the sort of person who says this, all I can tell these people is: you need to use a different browser. Microsoft has not updated the Mac version of its browser since 2001, and if you’re using it, you will have increasing numbers of problems as Web standards advance, and you’ll be increasingly vulnerable to security holes as well. If you’re using Mac OS X, switching won’t be a problem for you: you should use either Safari, which comes for free with your computer, or Mozilla Firefox, which you can download for free. If you’re on an older computer that uses OS 9 or earlier, modern browsers are harder to come by. I recommend WaMCom, a variant of the Mozilla browser that is probably the most current free browser available for the older version of Mac OS. Scroll down to the heading “Apple Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x classic” and click on the link that says “wamcom-131-macos9-20030723.sit”.

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Some more tweaks to the template a-comin’. Again, this post is the place to comment on the horrible things it does your personal Comics Curmudgeon reading experience.

Update: OK, I give up for the day. The site should be tweaked back to the way it was before I started with my meddlin’ this afternoon, so there should be no new problems, anyway. If anyone out there is a CSS wiz and can tell me why IE is pushing too-wide graphics past the bottom of the left-hand nav bar on screens with small resolutions, I’d be eternally grateful. Ugh.

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Do you hate the new layout for the site that I hastily threw together right before I got married? Of course you do: all right-thinking people do. Well, I think I’ve managed to come up with an alternative, one will improve on just about everything. So if things look wacky for the next little while, it’s because I’m fine-tuning it. Feel free to post any comments on how great it is, or problems you have with it, on this post.

Update: OK, so that seems to have gone relatively smoothly. I’m sure there are quirks, though, so this is the place to gripe about ’em.

Update II: OK, I’ve managed to fix a lot of problems, but I’ve still got one that is held over from the previous layout — its been driving me nuts since I switched to WordPress 1.5. I am posting this as a plea for help from l33t CSS hax0rs. Basically, on my old WordPress 1.2 layout, images could be as wide as they wanted: if they were wider than the main column, they just cheerfully extruded over the right margin. But in both the previous template and this one, comics that are wider than the main column just get pushed down below the nav bar. I have been reducing the size of the comics somewhat to try to minimize the number of people this happens to, but my ideal would be to go back to the way things were, since I’m never going to keep the comics a reasonable size and accommodate all users. (You’d be surprised how many of my visitors have 800 by 600 screens.) But I don’t have a clue how to even begin figuring what the differences in the layouts were that caused this change. A clue would be appreciated!

Update III: Electric Boogalee: More tweaking imminent. Things may look funky in the near future.

Update IV: The new batch: OK, some of the issues, like the grey stripe and the post numbers vs. sidebar issue, should now be fixed. Still can’t figure out why the big comics don’t like the sidebar though. Please help, helpful people!