Uh, Blogger?

Does anyone know why you can't use the fancy new (well, newer; they're a few years old now) templates for Blogger blogs when you're using FTP publishing? I think it's ridiculous.

Blog Post Date

Here's a little program I wrote a few weeks ago. It's still beta, maybe still alpha, and I'm working out the kinks. Pretty much, you enter the URLs of your blog(s) at the top of the script, and it scrapes out the blog title and the date of your last post. Judging by the screenshot, I don't post very often.

I wrote it because I wanted one place I could look to see if it was time to post again, and in some cases, how egregiously vacant I can be at times. What do you think? Is this useful? What are your thoughts?

Fixing Star Crash Blogger Theme in IE

The theme I am currently using for this blog, Star Crash by Blogcrowds, doesn't natively display correctly in Internet Explorer. The entire sidebar ends up at the end of all the blog posts, and that's really not acceptable. Here's how to fix that.

The Underscore Hack

The underscore hack is a way to hide certain CSS rules from all browsers except IE. Because our page renders correctly in more standards-compliant browsers (Firefox, Safari, etc.), we don't want to change the CSS for all of them. By putting an underscore in from of our property name (width: becomes _width:), we can show CSS to IE and all other browsers will ignore it. You can read more about this hack here.

The !important CSS Flag

The !important flag in CSS sets a rule to have precedence over any other rule that conflicts with it. If you have a paragraph with the class "note," and there are two rules that apply to that class, the one with the !important flag will take precedence. It can be quite handy. Here's an excerpt from the excellent book CSS Mastery by Andy Budd on the cascade and specificity:

With even a moderately complicated stylesheet, it is likely that two or more rules will target the same element. CSS handles such conflicts through a process known as the cascade. The cascade works by assigning an importance to each rule. Author stylesheets are considered the most important, followed by user stylesheets, and finally the default stylesheets used by your browser or user agent. To give users more control, they can override any rule by specifying it as !important–even a rule flagged as !important by the author.

The cascade works in the following order of importance:

• User styles flagged as !important
• Author styles flagged as !important
• Author styles
• User styles
• Styles applied by the browser/user agent

The Fix

The <div> element we need to change the style of has the ID of #beta. I, unfortunately, am not entirely sure why IE wants the element's position to be absolute, but that seems to solve the problem. Using our newly-acquired knowledge of the IE underscore hack and specificity in CSS, here's the code we need to insert into our template:

#beta {
    _position: absolute !important;
}

Voila! The Star Crash Blogger theme now renders correctly in Internet explorer. You can insert the code anywhere in the template; I inserted mine near the top so I can remember that it's a manual edit I've made.

If you've fixed your Blogger template, learned about the IE underscore hack for the first time, or learned something new about CSS, let me know in the comments! I always like hearing from you.

A Friend's Blog

Hey, I thought I should notify my few readers about a up-start blog by one of my buddies. You can see it here. It's pretty cool. He posts a lot more often then I do. :) Check it out.

YANB - Yet Another New Blog

Well, it probably won't be updated very often but, I've started another blog. It's a blog of pictures I've taken with my digital camera. You can look at it here. There is currently only one post but, hey! You have to start somewhere, right?

Blogging

Well, hmm. I haven't really been keeping up with this blog very well have I? I don't have an excuse this time; I haven't been busy at all. It seems these past few weeks my social life has died. Everything I was involved in ended for the summer. Plus, there's nobody in my age in this neighborhood. Oh well.

There is one thing to report though: I now am the proud owner of a digital camera! It's an HP Photosmart M307. 3.2 megapixels, 15X total zoom, yeah. It's pretty sweet. It's definitely not the cream of the crop but, I don't need that. I got it in a special at Radio Shack. Here's all the stuff that came in the box:

• HP Photosmart M307 camera
• HP Photosmart 7760 photo printer
• 2 ink cartridges
• 20 sheets of photo paper
• 64 MB Secure Digital memory stick
• USB cable
• All the driver and image management software

All for only $200! I was ecstatic! Actually, I still am. :)

Well, that's all for now. I'll try to post more!

New blog

Hey, you can also visit my other brand spankin' new blog here. It got miscellaneous short stories that I've written and some sample chapters from little books. Anyway, check it out!