Cascading Style Shit

Woo! I’ve munged it up good now. Looks okay in Opera, but in IE the left column comes unglued and romps across the page willy nilly when the window is resized. (Willy nilly. Heh. Gay).

I hate rogue graphic elements.

I’m finding it harder than expected to twiddle with the graphics in WordPress. Basically, you pick a style sheet, which stays in force, and then your CSS edits are applied on top of it. So you have to figure out what’s under there and then undo it. I was well into it before I realized they charge you for the privilege of twiddling the CSS, and I’d dabbled so much at that point I sighed and forked over the $15 to make the changes stick.

Now that I’ve paid real folding money I can’t back out and jump to Blogger or something.

This is all because I’m too cheap to buy another domain name and host the software myself. But my domain name habit got a little out of control for a while there. Every time I had a thought, I expressed it in a web address. And once I own an address, I feel compelled to keep renewing it (I can’t risk someone else snapping up squeakyweaselrectums.com). I guess it’s a mental hangover from the early cowboy bubble Ponzi tulip days of the Web, when fortunes were made pinching and reselling the good names. Not by me, sad to say.

Anyhow, I’ve grown to like WordPress’ tag surfing thingie. It’s so egalitarian. You click on a category, like politics — or squeakyweaselrectums — and you see the most recent posts on the topic, arranged by posting time. The size or popularity of the blog has nothing to do with it. I like this because I enjoy reading what ordinary people have to say about stuff.

So I can laugh at them.

Oh, sure, there are plenty of clever people out there, but what fun is that? The great, wide, shining sea of internet punditry gently undulates between competence and mediocrity. Bo-ring. That rare, stinking shitburger of a blog is like a lustrous pearl of potential entertainment. Cultivate it. Leave it cryptic messages in its comments section. Don’t let it get bored and move on to scrapbooking or fantasy soccer.

If you followed a comment of mine upstream to get here, calm down. I’m not talking about you. I don’t go a-trollin’ under this moniker, so you must be competent and bo-ring.

Anyhow, I reckon there’s a float tag in there jamming up my left sidebar. I don’t know. I lost interest in HTML around the time CSS arrived, so my usual method is to reach into the code and start ripping stuff out until it either works or dies. That makes this WordPress deal — where I can’t subtract code, I can only put more code on top — all the much more tedious to navigate. All you Slaves of Gates will just have to wait until I can nail the thing to learn the beginning of my sentences. All threes and threes of you reading this.

UPDATE: Okay. It’s not elegant, but it’s better (at least in IE…we’ll have to see what other make of it). I had to hardcode in a margin value to keep the left sidebar in its place. It hops around a little when the window is resized, but it’s not intruding on the middle column’s space any more.