November 30, 2005
Does this look funny to you?

I installed Movable Type 3.2 over the weekend. When I came back to the office on Tuesday, I noticed that my main page displays incorrectly on my PC here. Though my stylesheet did not change, it appears that the main body of the blog is wider now, which means there's not enough room for the sidebar. As such, all the sidebar contents, such as the archive and blogroll links, show up at the bottom of the page instead. This doesn't happen at home on my XP machine, where I've tried it in both Firefox and IE. It's only here on my Win2K box with IE6 that it looks this way.

So, I'd like to know: Does this page look any different to you today than it did last week? If so, please leave a comment or drop me an email, and tell me what OS and browser you're using. Thanks!

Posted by Charles Kuffner on November 30, 2005 to Administrivia | TrackBack
Comments

Yes, the body is wider, and so your sidebar moves to the bottom. I am using IE version 6.

Posted by: blurker gone bad on November 30, 2005 8:52 AM

Oh, and I'm also getting strange ascii characters where I assume you had bullets in your lists of early voting hours and locations.

Posted by: blurker gone bad on November 30, 2005 8:54 AM

I also notice this on my work machine, which happens to be a Win2000 Professional / IE6 setup.

On my home machines (WinXP), it looks normal.

Posted by: William Hughes on November 30, 2005 9:15 AM

Firefox 1.5 on Win2k looks OK, but I get the same funkiness you describe when I look in IE 6 (same OS).

Of course, I only use IE when I absolutely have to - does your office mandate a browser? Or do you have to use multiple browsers in your line of work?

Posted by: CrispyShot on November 30, 2005 9:22 AM

Well, from Safari on Mac OS X 10.3.9, hours for early voting are figured in euros.

Posted by: Laura on November 30, 2005 9:45 AM

It's not a new problem. I remember sending you mail quite a while (year or so). Same symptoms tho - worked with everything except IE6 on Win2K.

Posted by: Charles M on November 30, 2005 9:49 AM

Thanks everyone for the feedback. I've deleted the bullet points from the Early Voting post - I'd just copied from the Chron story, and for whatever the reason, it got mangled in the rendering. That's also happening to me now with quotation marks and dashes from copied text. Very annoying.

I don't have control over my browser here. I remember your complaint now, Charles M, but until now my blog had always displayed correctly for me with IE6 and Win2K. Strange.

Looks like it's off to the MT forums I go to see what others have tried to fix this sort of thing. Sigh...

Posted by: Charles Kuffner on November 30, 2005 10:50 AM

I only saw the effect when I had the browser window too narrow. It was almost if IE6 decided the text and sidebars had to be a certain size - if the window was too narrow, the sidebar went to the bottom. NS7 just puts in a horizontal scroll.

Incidentally, I just tried it with IE6 and XP. It would appear to be an IE6 bug.

Posted by: Charles M on November 30, 2005 11:24 AM

for whatever the reason, it got mangled in the rendering
Your page has a meta content set to a windows code page that is likely the cause of your problem.
meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

Try meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"

Posted by: Michael on November 30, 2005 11:56 AM