IE7 Double Padding on Clearing DIVs
Posted by admin | Filed under CSS
About a week or so ago I encountered a new CSS issue that only was present in IE7 that I was surprised I hadn’t run in to before. Actually I was more surprised to encounter an issue that was only present in IE7 and fine in IE6. Maybe its just me but those bugs seem few and far between.
I was doing a simple two column layout and using my footer to clear the two columns which were floated left. Easy enough. The problem came in to play when I added some padding to the top of my footer which when displayed in IE7 was doubled. Right away my mind jumped to the well documented double float margin bug present in IE6. The solution to that one is to add “display:inline” to the float container and all is well. Unfortunately that did not work in this case BUT a small adjustment to “display:inline-block” did the trick.
Before:
#footer{
clear:both;
padding:15px 0;
width:800px;
}
After:
#footerBox{
clear:both;
display:inline-block;
padding:15px 0;
width:800px;
}
When implementing the solution on actual site files I prefer to apply the “display:inline-block;” rule with conditional commenting. However having the rule in the main CSS does not appear to cause conflicts in any other browsers I test on (Safari, Firefox, IE6) so its a matter of personal preference. Personally I strongly dislike IE and relegate all IE specific fixes etc to their own CSS that is included via conditional comments.
Tags: browser compatability, CSS
I <3 WPLite
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
I’m a big fan of WordPress and I just found my new favorite plugin, WPLite. As much as I think WordPress is user friendly and very intuitive the non-techy user often seems to have trouble navigating the menus.
Enter WPLite.
This nifty plugin allows me to login and disable individual menu items as well as specific sections of the post meta, ie: categories, tags or custom fields. It even works with other plugins so you can hide the options/settings menu of a plugin but still allow access to the front end. I do this frequently with the Event Calendar plugin. If you’re looking for an easy way to strip down the WordPress admin area beyond what the predefined roles give you then this might be a lifesaver.
Is Ruby the next big thing?
Posted by admin | Filed under Web Dev
I’ll admit it, I thought the Ruby on Rails framework was going to be a fad that faded away within a year or two. However it’s still here, and while I’m not sure I’ve warmed up to Rails i’ve gotten a little more curious with it’s big brother Ruby. Now I have no hands on experience with Ruby it just seems as though its come up in conversation more recently that this time last year. My headhunter friend has frequently asked if I know any Ruby programmers.
Just for fun I played around with Google Trends this afternoon to see if in fact people are searching for Ruby any more now than they were a year ago. In an effort to ignore searches for “ruby” the gemstone versus Ruby the programming language I formatted searched for the phrase “ruby programming”. I don’t claim these results really show an accurate gauge of programming language popularity (check link for that) but it was a fun experiment. I threw in PHP and Python for a comparison but left out the big guns ie:Java, it just didn’t seem fair to compare Java to Ruby.
Search Trends in the United States
Search Trends in the United States in 2008
Search Trends Worldwide in 2008
I’d describe the graphs as “slow and steady”, while there didn’t seem to be any notable influx of changes I found it interesting how close Ruby and PHP results appeared in the United States. Event more surprising to me was that Python presented considerably higher search popularity than PHP in 2008. Maybe I should have titled the article “Is Python the Next Big Thing?”.