Sorry about that…

I’m a Mozilla & Firefox browser fan, and in fact, only use IE for some odd websites that I need for work. Yesterday I changed the theme for this blog. WordPress doesn’t offer a lot of options for 3-column layouts (although to be fair, Blogger didn’t offer any at all). Don’t ask why, I just prefer the 3 column look. Anyway, WP only had the two Andreas themes until they recently added a few more. I like what Joe Flirt did with his so much that I stole his idea was inspired to make another attempt to tweak the Garland theme. I like the balanced Andreas 09 look, but I also want a muted background color for the posts – I find it’s easier to read than the bright white background. So I’ve been playing with the Garland on and off for a few weeks.

Anyway, yesterday I set it and went off to do other things. Joe Flirt sent me a “heads up” email to let me know that while it displayed fine in Firefox (I’ve been using Mozz Seamonkey), in IE7 the formatting was “completely hosed.” Whoops. So I fooled around with this for a bit, and discovered that in the other balanced 3-column formats it was not displaying correctly. I began removing the text widgets, thinking that I had some bad HTML in one of them. While my blogging links are now handled by the WordPress widget, those for other websites were still hand-coded links. I ended up removing everything from the left hand column, and then moving the WP link widget over there instead. For some reason that I still haven’t figured out, that fixed the display problem. In the meantime, FF and Mozz browsers evinced no display issues.

So, I’m still doing the housekeeping thing. Now I’m tweaking the colors. I kind of like the greyish-blue mixed with the current background color. I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s in the red area with a lot of grey, and the fonts show up without the need to squint. I’m certainly open to feedback, though.

Edit: About the Seamonkey thing; I run 3 browsers at home and at work.  While I like Firefox and use it for just about everything, I don’t like the idea of people checking out the browser history on my PC. While I don’t suspect any one of espionage, I know that at accidents happen. At home, I have the PC set up with different profiles, so my wife and daughter can set up their own desktops and menus. I happen to like the older “Win 95” look better than the “XP” look, and I like more screen resolution, so I set mine up accordingly. But if my daughter needs to look up something quickly, she will use my desktop if it happens to be up and running. Likewise at work, someone might need to point something out to me on the screen. No point in having them type something in the address bar, only to have, say, the Blowfish.com or Stockroom.com links come cascading down. As the boss, I honestly do try to set an example.

Anyway, since my workmates and family don’t know much about PCs, I have taken to doing my sex blogging with Seamonkey because I don’t have much concern that they’ll know enough to dig through my menus to open it, even by accident. And as a bonus, clicking on a mail-to link will open Seamonkey’s own mail/news client instead of opening the one that I use for work. This way, anyone snooping through my mail folder won’t accidentally see, for example, some of the emails that I trade with other bloggers.

I only mention this because lately I’ve been reading blogs in which writers report having been discovered by a failure to  clear their traces (history tree, forgetting to log out, etc.).  Moving to a different browser is not a perfect fix, but it might be helpful for some of you with similar privacy issues as I have.