I had some downtime tonight (well not really, but I figure that was a good form of procrastination) so I decided to take a quick look into my blog and see what the issue was with Internet Explorer 6.0 and my sidebar.

It turns out, as you may already know, that I’m an idiot. It wasn’t totally the browser’s fault. I was migrating (patching heavily) this theme from a dynamic/fluid width to a fixed width and I made a dumb mistake. I wouldn’t call it a mistake, but rather something that should have been avoided, knowing how finicky IE is.

I left all my widths for content and the sidebar as percentages instead of converting them to fixed pixels. Thinking about it now, I don’t understand why it doesn’t work in IE, but learning Internet Explorer 6.0 CSS rules is like learning to speak Klingon : You probably could if you really wanted to, but what’s the point?

I also failed to mention that I had an Adsense unit at the bottom for which I forgot to do a clear: both.

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After all the trouble I went through making sure my theme works in Internet Explorer 7, you’d think that would be all right? Nope.

Last night I had some problems trying to get Ubuntu on my computer. One of the steps involved restoring a previous disk image I had on when I just installed Windows XP. I usually back things up and restore this image every few months. It’s bare, clean and very fast. All that’s included are drivers, 7-Zip, Notepad++, Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.0.

I wanted to check the position of some new ad blocks I put up on the site, so I pulled it up in Internet Explorer 6. To my dismay, but no surprise, my theme looked horrible; the sidebar was all pushed way down on the right.

What can you do at this point? I just sighed and forgot about it.

So I’ll take this time to apologize to the 6.3714% of my visitors that are cursed with Internet Explorer 6.0. I’ll try to fix it when/if I get some downtime.

Popularity: 15%

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What To Do When You Can’t Cron

One pet peeve that I have with 1and1 hosting was their lack of Cron Jobs. Cron Jobs are basically the Unix method of scheduling stuff, much like the Windows Task Scheduler. If you’re on a Unix/Linux host, then they use cron jobs to schedule their internal activity. But not every host is kind enough to give you the same power to do so. Now that I’m on DreamHost, I don’t have this problem anymore, but a lot of shared hosts still lock up the cron jobs. And since hosts like 1and1 aren’t too reliable with their backups, doing your own backups becomes, more of less, essential. There are, of course, alternatives if your host doesn’t provide you with cron jobs, such as phpJobScheduler (used this a lot back in the day) and pseudo-cron.

How The Other Guys Work

The way these work is that, they keep track of tasks and times every time the cron job is called, but you need to include them in one of your highly accessed pages (e.g. Home page). With phpJobScheduler, you can include the file in your PHP code, or you can include it using the img tag. Using the second (2nd) method spits back a transparent GIF of 1 pixel, so nothing will be displayed on your page and you could even use it within plain HTML pages if you needed to. When this is triggered, it checks the database for time of each task, compares that to the current time, them if x > y it runs the task. Simple really. Since they need to be triggered via a user visit, it’s never going to be pin point accurate; this is why you need to include it on a page getting high traffic. Some of the scripts even have an option to build in to help with this. It’s a sort of buffer time. This says that even if the specific start time of the task hasn’t arrived yet, run it anyway if it’s within the buffer amount. You would increase or decrease the buffer based on your anticipated traffic.

Popularity: 20%

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This has been a long time in the making, but I’ve finally decided to move this blog (and a few other things I’m hosting) to DreamHost. Why DreamHost? Because they offer a great package, what can I say? I’ve been hosting at 1and1 for over a year, but after a few bad experiences, I’ve decided to move to something a bit more robust.

Although it’s not really fair to compare DreamHost to 1and1 Hosting, let’s give it a shot:

Cron Jobs

I use these for my MySQL backups. Download a nice PHP script and set up a cron job to run said script at a scheduled time. Without cron jobs, I have to go through the hoopla of running some PsuedoCron stuff, which basically runs a script if a user visits your website after the script has been scheduled to run. This is fine for small scripts, but didn’t really fly much for my database backups, since the poor sap that happened to trigger the script would have to sit and wait for it’s completion, as it would appear to be something the website was loading.

Ruby On Rails

After working so much with CakePHP, I can’t help but be curious. I really doubt that I’m going to jump ship, but it’s good to have an environment to play with.

Space and Bandwidth

You got 500 GB of disk space to play with, and 5.0 TB of monthly bandwidth. This is enough to host at least a few good sized sites under one account. The unlimited Domains makes this a breeze.

Popularity: 14%

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Welcome to the September 24, 2007 edition of web development 2.0.

Madeleine Begun Kane presents Ode To The Mobile Web (Cell Phone Browsing Humor) posted at Mad Kane’s Humor Blog.

General

Paul presents Make Web Site Development Easy posted at BigTechnical, saying, “Great CSS tools and more.” Although I don’t really dig the Blueprint CSS framework, the tips on Nifty Corners and gradients are good.

Don Albrecht presents Why Are CSS Frameworks Important to AJAX Development posted at Ajax Bestiary, saying, “It’s way to easy to get burned in AJAX development when you don’t start with a good foundation. Here’s an exploration of why CSS Frameworks can give your entire development process a leg up. Even the javascript.” Again, I’m not a fan of CSS frameworks, but to each his own.

John W. Furst presents Use Safe Identifiers In Your Web Templates posted at E-Biz Booster Blog, saying, “I wrote this, because I was getting tired of looking up the specifics in different specs all the time. You might find it to be a helpful resource for your readers.”

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Now I know you’ve read about this and it’s usually a good idea: concentrate most of your ads on your older posts and hide ads from your regular visitors. I mean, they come here everyday, reward them with a little bit of clean content.

But also, if you’re like me, you’re lazy and haven’t gotten around to coding this yet. Well here you go, a Wordpress plugin that I’ve stumbled upon: Who See’s Ads?.

First of all, you can display anything in these blocks: HTML, JavaScript, even PHP. The ad blocks are controlled by certain contexts. It’s a lil’ bit like coding if you think about it. You still a bunch of if statements together to determine whether or not your content is displayed. These include:

• Regular visitors - Which you can define by those who’ve viewed your content a certain number of times within a certain period (eg. twice in 10 days).
• Coming from search engine - Self explanatory I hope.
• Posts older than a defined number of days
• Logged in visitors
• Between a particular date period
• If the ad was viewed a certain number of times - You could set and expiration duration

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I jsut realized that my brand new Wordpress theme sucks in Internet Explorer 7. My footer doesn’t show up, and my sidebar is all the way to the bottom.

I remember when I first started with this them, I went through the whole cross browser thing and everything looked fine. I tweaked everything to my liking and was satisfied. Now I have to go backwards, one element at a time and try to isolate which tweak, new content, post, or plugin that has caused this to happen.

Or I may just find a new theme. But in the mean while, I’ll continue hating IE. Why doesn’t stuff just work as it’s supposed to?

 I realized this problem at the worst possible time, Monday morning at 1:41AM, so who knows when I’ll get to it.

Popularity: 12%

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I am proud to present the first edition of Carnival of Web Development 2.0. This is my first time hosting one of these things, so enjoy:

General

1. Doug Boude presents DEMYSTIFYING JSON posted at Doug Boude (rhymes with ‘loud’)
2. sylv3rblade presents Stages of Software Development posted at Atma Xplorer, saying, “My take on the process of software development”
3. prakash presents A2Z Informative-Technology, Software, Internet, Tips, Ideas posted at A2Z Informative, saying, “Identifying the color code of an image on the screen is not an easy task. Usually it involves a multi step process and is time consuming. But this tool is able to find out HTML, RGB or HEX color of any pixel on the screen with just a single mouse click. This little tool is very useful for webmasters.”
4. Thorsten Ott presents Sourcebench - freelancer sites reviews posted at Sourcebench - building a better web.
5. Scott H presents 15 Web Sites College Students Can’t Live Without posted at College and Finance, saying, “Not specifically about design, but has a great list of web sites students love, including StumbleUpon which, in terms of developing a web site, can be quite useful.”

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