Thu, September 8, 2005
Photo Improvements—11:58 AM
If I die of a premature cardiac arrest, you can be damn sure that CSS and Win/IE 6 are to blame. One of the issues that kept me up latest and screaming loudest was a problem with the photo gallery displays in Windows IE 6. When you moved your cursor over the slide image, it would slide (quite literally) to the left, and stay there.
I spent a few hours troubleshooting this yesterday, digging through every line of the site's main CSS style sheet to figure it out: the answer was actually a combination of things (just like in Batman – the face cream won't kill you but the face cream with the hair spray will). For one, the application of borders to links (the little dotted line that appears under a link when you put your cursor over it – or "rollover" in web parlance, or "hover" in CSS parlance). If I took this out, the images would stay put. But it had to be more than that, because the images in text (or in the Related column) weren't moving.
So, I kept digging and found out that if I removed an additional "position: relative" declaration in the style rules for that object, it would work. One tiny line: four hours of searching. But it's fixed now! (W00t!)
Also, the ability to navigate through the entire photo archive using the same flicker (prev/next) that powers the photo gallery views. Once I started using the site, that seemed conspicuously absent, so I made it work. You can use that flicker to navigate through individual galleries, or pseudo-galleries (galleries of images related to a particular item), or search results – so why not the whole photo archive, too? So that's done, and it's kind of a fun way to go because images are added at random times for all different reasons, so each click of the "previous" link is a surprise!
Thanks; keep enjoying the new site. And keep e-mailing me if you run into glitches – or posting them in the comments if you prefer to shame me publicly.
