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Website Bugfixes and Such

As is usually the case with major updates to the site, I’ve been spending my occasional spare moments since the launch looking for bugs and quashing them. I’m sure the site is not bug-free, but I think I’ve hammered out all the major issues. This time around was particularly difficult, since I didn’t reuse much of the code from the last site and it was sort-of like starting over (and I used a lot of new techniques that I’m not as familiar with troubleshooting).

One of the things I fixed was that the site had been failing the CSS 3.0 validation because of some Internet Explorer-specific code regarding image opacity, where IE (even the new IE 8!) has its own made-up opacity method instead of using the documented CSS standard. I couldn’t really fix this without breaking the site in IE 7 & 8, so I pulled the bad Microsoft code into a separate file that only gets loaded if you’re using IE. This makes the core code of the site compliant with the standards again.

The other thorn in my side has been an incompatibility with the current Firefox 3.5 Beta on Windows and Linux, and an identical issue effecting the released Firefox 3.0 but only in Linux. This caused the menu (when it is pinned at the top of the screen) to flicker annoyingly when scrolling the page up and down. This one wasn’t at all my fault; it’s the result of a Firefox bug (which I filed in their bug tracker). Initially I was going to just let it stay broken, since it only affects a small subset of my readers, but I spent a little time figuring out a workaround since I’m not confident the Mozilla folks will get this fixed promptly.

As always, there’s a list of officially supported browsers on my ‘About the Site‘ page. If you have any trouble in any of those browsers, please let me know!

Scott Bradford is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.