I Hate Internet Explorer!
Following Donncha’s suggestions for the photoblog theme I’m building I started to look at including thumbnails in the sidebar.
It’s actually far simpler than I initially thought it would be. When one uploads the photo to the blog you just need to put a thumbnail version (automatically created by wp!) into the field that says “optional excerpt”. You can then call that in the sidebar by using the_excerpt. Works beautifully for a vertical sidebar. I’m going to have a small problem when trying to do the thumbnails horizontally under the main post as “the_excerpt” automatically inserts “p” tags around the entry. I have a fix for it but I am going to look at that for a different version of the theme. As you can see from the thumbnail on the left (click for a larger version) it displays the thumbnails absolutely spot on. I have used a “special” piece of code to exclude a particular category. In this case it’s category 1 (words) which will be displayed elsewhere.
Looks fantastic in Firefox and Opera. As per usual, IE sucks. Click the image for a larger version and you’ll see that:
1. The Previous Post link doesn’t line up within the horizontal borders like it does with FF.
2. The sidebar drops to below the main content.
I know these are fixable but it means using “hacks”. Something I absolutely hate having to do. Please, if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 or below and are able, upgrade to a decent browser. Of course, I could just ignore IE and code for FF. Then I would get the complaint that I am excluding those readers at work on IE. I have an answer to that: Close the browser and do some work! Thanks for visiting though ;)
If it ever comes up to scratch I will release the theme. If you want to watch the development have a peek at http://devblog.cornellfinch.com. Bear in mind that at any point during the development the blog might not function as you expect it to, or at all for that matter!
goat on December 6th, 2006
“Close the browser and do some work!”
Yeah, whatever… :o)