Low Sidebar

These are my rote instructions when sidebar nosedives happen, which mostly occur in the Internet Explorer browser. I don't know that it happens very much in Firefox, but I know other horror stories about Firefox, so don't get excited!

But, on to our problem! Sometimes it's simple, sometimes not.

• Your sidebar may be going to the bottom because your server is crazy due to being worked on by Blogger. Your sidebar doesn't begin at the top like it's supposed to.
  
• Wrong code or missing pieces of code sometimes cause this kind of jump or aberration.
  
• It is probable you'll have to get out of Compose mode and enter Html mode in order to see wrong code in the posts.
  
• It is possible you have posted too large a photo or too long a link. Change that and it might go back to the top of the page. Look for a misstated IMG code.
  
• Possibly your main column width and sidebar exceed allowable Content width or header width.
  
• Sometimes one of the "floats" in the template will get changed for some reason and be wrong. Investigate. Options are "left", "right", and "none".
  
• If you suspect it may be caused by something in a particular post, you could Save as Draft to remove it temporarily and see if it was the cause. Then you can Publish it again later to put it back in place.
  
• Also, sometimes I've found it to be caused by just getting some wrong or missing code in the template or in a recent post. You might have one tag or symbol too many or too few. If you've deleted some things, maybe you left one little piece of nonsense code behind that's confusing the template.
  
• Once it was caused in a friend's site by a -->, the closing tag for hiding a comment; it had no start tag, was just wrongly there!

Play Sherlock Holmes and test some changes without saving them until you use Preview and see that the change works and does no harm. It's hard, but I don't know any easy way.

To test posts one at a time, use the Permalink feature; if you click on the Post Title, your site will show only that one post. When you keep doing the blog like that, you MAY find a single post that pushes the sidebar down and that post will be the cause of your trouble. In other cases, of course, the trouble is coming from the sidebar and you just have to figure it out.

To hear all this put another way, go to Peter's post about it or Chuck's post.

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Font Tags As Style Statement

W3C says: The <font> tag in HTML is deprecated. It is supposed to be removed in a future version of HTML.

Even if a lot of people are using it, you should try to avoid it, and use styles instead.

Yipes. I have always used the <font> tags, so I probably have lots of errors out there, but I don't think I'll correct any of them until they truly cease to work. Meanwhile I guess I will try to use the "styles". I'm still teaching myself and will probably step on my own whoosit! But let's plod on and look at the following that you/I might place in a post:

<p style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:130%;color:green">

ALL of it should precede the text to be viewed (green text below). View the Source Code for this post if that isn't clear.)

This is a sentence with some text in it. This is a dizzy sentence with some text in it. This is yet again a sentence with some text in it. This is another sentence with some text in it. This is a sentence with some silly green text in it. This is another silly sentence with some text in it. This is a damn sentence with some text in it. This is a puke-green sentence with some more damn text in it.

That would be too complicated, I suppose, if you needed it for frequent use or intended it for every post. I need to establish it as a CSS description so that it's on tap when I need it. So I'll add

#fs1 {font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:130%;color:green; }

to my template's CSS (cascading style sheets). The "fs1" is just an arbitrary code that I made up; as long as it is repeated in the code below, any word you choose instead will do.

Reference to the #fs1 is placed in the post thus:

<div id="fs1"> text </div>

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