ktinkel

I did not attempt to unravel your CSS, but did look at the page in the Web Developer extension in Firefox (which has several tools that are very useful for debugging pages).

The main problem seems to be in the widths of the two major things: #sidebar and #narrowcolumn. They amount to 740px PLUS about 30px in margins (total of 770px or so). They sit in #page (which defines the colored frame) of 760px. The right edge of #narrowcolumn is outside of the visual frame, so the text is too.

Narrowcolumn and sidebar DIVs overlap each other as well.

Hope that helps.

Kathleen

Did you notice the warning that appears on the very bottom of your page:

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Warning: Unknown: Your script possibly relies on a session side-effect which existed until PHP 4.2.3. Please be advised that the session extension does not consider global variables as a source of data, unless register_globals is enabled. You can disable this functionality and this warning by setting session.bug_compat_42 or session.bug_compat_warn to off, respectively. in Unknown on line 0
———————————————————–

I wonder if that has something to do with your problems.

I checked your site in these browsers: Firefox, Safari, Camino, Opera, and MSIE 5.2.3, all on a Mac.

The only one that shows the two side columns correctly (I assume — as two distinct columns) is MSIE 5. But the main text area is placed below the side columns (common problem with MSIE).

In all the others, the two narrow columns sort of overlap and commingle. (Usually, Mac and Win Firefox have identical results; and Firefox and Mozilla also usually have similar results.)

Aside from the PHP issue, I agree with you: it is the CSS, probably in your width (etc.) properties. I am especially suspicious about the total widths of all the columns, including margins, borders, and padding.

You could try changing narrowcolumn from 59% to, say, 57%. That might help. (For MSIE 6, I usually allow 2% slop — in a column gutter — to compensate for its inability to measure correctly! So make sure the total of all widths is 98% or less.)

Have you validated your HTML and CSS at W3C.org? If you fail, they provide a list that shows where the problems are, with line numbers.

That is all I can think of. Best of luck with it.

(BTW: I am also a writer using one of Scott’s themes, Minimalist Sandbox. His work must appeal to writers!)

You must close your link code before you can unravel your problem. (It needs to end with \[space]/>\ in order to be valid XHTML.) All the validation errors refer to this (the validator sees the opening \<\ as text because the line is not closed).

As for the problem with the sidebar sliding down, it has to do with the way MSIE calculates widths. The only solution I know of for sure is to allow for a few uncounted pixels that can flex between the main and sidebar columns.

Good luck with it. Very pretty blog.