U.B. Formattin'... well, re-formattin'

Ok, now we're moving into troubleshooting a particular issue that occurs in Blogger if you're not a little careful... column-misalignment.

Btw, you FIREFOX users may even be oblivious to this issue, until you start wondering why your hit-counts are down.

[Note: The problem itself is not caused by FireFox, but if you're using FireFox you're probably oblivious to the fact that you have an issue at all. Btw, you COULD get the IE Tab at GetFireFox.com and install it -- then you'll be able to add any particular site to a list of site that you want to see with an MSIE type of look/feel.]

Your blog may look fine to you; but your MS Internet Explorer (MSIE) surfers think it really sucks... because here's what they're seeing....



And of course, our objective today is to help you reformat something to cure the misalignment problem so it will again look like THIS... with perfectly aligned columns... side by side...



The basic problem is a column WIDTH issue. Your two columns are battling for turf. If either column is too 'wide', then they just can't seem to live side-by-side in peace. [Guys, is there a spiritual lesson here for us in our marriages? **wink**] So the objective is to discover what has 'swelled', and how do I get it to (humbly, LOL) return to the proper width.

Ok... the problematic column could be EITHER column.

How to troubleshoot it:

When did the problem surface?

If you use MSIE all the time, and one day you post something and the problem suddenly surfaces... well then, duh.... the problem was probably caused by that particular post.

Or if you just now changed something in your navigation side-bar and you suddenly experienced this formatting issue... duh... the problem is probably in your side-bar column.

[Ah... but if you're regularly a FireFox user... then of course you don't really know WHEN the problem first occurred, so you're going to have to do some further investigating. I'll describe that process further below.]

The basic 'width' problem is probably caused by one or more of the following:

• pics that are too wide.
• a continuous string of characters that are longer than the normal column width. Eg... a bunch of asterisks ***************** or hyphens -----------------
• a continuous text-link that is too wide
  (http://indychristian.com/2005/12/personal-account-of-having-to-face.html

How to cure these? Guess it's obvious. Use the 'Archie Bunker' cure:

"Dat's elementary dere, Meathead. Don't do dat anymore!"

[Now for those of you who may be new to 'resizing' your pics... that cure may have been just a little tiny bit overly-simplistic. So I've included the pic below, giving you a hint how to resize your pic. It'll just take a little time and patience, getting used to click-dragging the corner-handle of the pic. Btw, that 'handle' only appears after you click on the image itself, first. Then when you hover over a corner, the little 'handle' will appear. Click-drag it to any size... larger or smaller.



Hope that helped.

Now... back to the issue of trouble-shooting when you don't KNOW what or when your problem was caused. Here's my process of finding out.

• Intuition -- Just look down your page... especially the sidebar first. Do you have any images that automatically jump out at you that maybe they're wider than normal? If you find that the problem was in the sidebar, you're pretty much home-free... just cure it.

Note: Again, for you folks that are new to picture resizing, that's not quite so easy in the sidebar, because now you'll have to resize it using the html-code itself. Not a huge problem... The image-tag you used to put the picture into the template-code just needs to now have some 'height' and 'width' elements added within it. For now, let's just say that's a trial & error process -- play with those dimensions til you have them the size you want. Example coding...

• Ok, now lastly... if you believe the problem is in one or more of the individual posts but you don't know which one... you may have to now just start looking at each post INDIVIDUALLY... not all together. How to do that? Remember, each post really has its own individual web-page... complete with its own permalink/URL/address. Ahhh... but how do you find out what that page-address is? Here's one example of how that's known... at least in the Blogger-template that I've chosen here at U.B.bloggin'...

Click that little link... and it'll take you to that post's individual webpage address.

Ok, so now you know what you have to do... just go down through your blog and click each post's little permalink, one-by-one... and see if the individual page looks ok. Are the column's in alignment?



If so, that's not the offending post. Go check the next one.

And keep checking the individual posts, one-by-one, until you find the offending culprit post.

Then cure the problem within the post, as we've discussed above.

And if all else fails... and you're about to get entirely frustrated with looking for the problem... or curing it... call me...

I'll pray for you. LOL

[and help you.... 317-490-1255]

***************************

Actually, for you geeks out there, here's a geek-speak version that truly goes into the details of the issue above. And it explains some technical workarounds not mentioned above. Hope it helps some of you.