Things I have learned

What I’ve learned while working on this new design:

  • Margin collapsing is irritating and useful at the same time. Thanks to Becky pointing that site out to me I figured out what I needed to do to fix the part that was irritating me.
  • Overflow fixes an issue that I’ve been having much more cleanly than my workaround.
  • IE is still the devil. It is way too forgiving of mistakes. It also does things the wrong way, but in a way that makes me think it’s right. I’ve learned, though, that IE is never right.
  • It is apparently not acceptable to use <p /> inside a blockquote. One must instead wrap the contents of a blockquote in <p>these tags</p> or the site won’t validate as xhtml strict.
  • I hate styling comments most of all.

However, it’s finally done! Things were probably looking rather wonky before as I tried to fix some errors in my template files. All should be well, now. With this theme I was able to incorporate some things I had left out of the first, such as the link to my RSS feed. That as well as a few other things are located in the sidebar under Misc. I couldn’t come up with a better name for that section because it really is miscellaneous. Those icons are from a set that can be found at Vikiworks. Additionally, I found myself using Twitter more than I thought I would and wanted to include more tweets. My previous footer design didn’t work so well with showing more than one tweet so reason #5 to have a sidebar. (Yes, I did just make that number up.)

I still have some tweaks to do but for now I’m calling it quits. Time to do something other than stare at CSS and XHTML and pull my hair in frustration because the validator doesn’t like my placement of <p/> tags!

(As noted on the domain page I am aware that the footer doesn’t show up in Firefox 2. It’s weird and I’m not sure why.)