"ONE ON'T CROSSBEAMS GONE OUT ASKEW ON TREADLE!" *

* Translation: Trouble at the SLIFR mill

Updated in bold Tuesday, January 6

Updated ONCE AGAIN in bold Sunday, January 11

It has come to my attention, through the conscientious communiqués of several SLIFR readers since the holidays began, that there have been some problems when it comes to reading this blog. (No, I mean other than the ones involving ability to express opinion, writing style and general agreeability or lack thereof.) It seems that some readers have been, for about two weeks now, seeing the (Alert: Dario Argento reference) deep red of the sidebar take over from the usual pale yellow on which the black type text usually sits. It looks like this…


when it oughta look this.

And it ain’t very readable, that black text on that deep red background.

So, after a polling of those concerned e-mailers, it was quickly determined that what the folks who were having problems had in common (including myself, whenever I access the blog at my office computer) was that we were all using Mozilla Firefox browsers. Apparently there’s something that needs to be tweaked, yanked, jerked or otherwise manhandled in order to keep this from happening to those of you who, in a free society, choose to use Mozilla Firefox to navigate the whitewater of the Internet. Being the technical incompetent that I am, I will be consulting with the many geniuses that surround me in the hopes of making up for my inadequacy with HTML code and getting that puzzlement righted as soon as possible. Of course, if any of you reading this have any suggestions they would most eagerly be accepted. Faithful reader and friend PSaga advises that clicking on individual entries seems to restore the template properly, and it does seem to work for me. But until such time as I can tell you that the problem has been taken care of across the board, if you're a Mozilla Firefox user you might want to trust your online reading experience to Internet Explorer or some other able browser when you read SLIFR over the next few days. This is serious, folks. I’ll accept responsibility for rotting your brain, but your eyes are sacred.

UPDATE Sunday, January 11: Well, it seems like we (and by "we" I mean "not me") may have zeroed in on the problem. A reader going under the moniker California dropped a comment this morning that is well worth reprinting here, for those of you who may still have some curiosity about this situation. It went a little something like this:

"I don't think it's just a matter of 'Firefox is no good, use IE.' The reason that the individual posts look fine but the main page doesn't, is that there's a single post there causing trouble.

When you look at the snowed-in drive-in post on its own (here) you get the red background error. So when that post is bumped off of the main page, the problem will move from the main page to the first 'Older posts' page. Problem not quite solved, but less noticeable.

Which piece of the code is actually causing the trouble I have no idea, but it's probably an easy if you know what it is."

It so happens that I can recall noticing the bleeding red for the first time round about when I first published that apparently troubled drive-in entry, so I will be very interested to see if California's theory turns out to be true. Once a few more posts get added to the SLIFR main page and that drive-in post gets bumped to the "Older Posts" section we may very well see this problem if not exactly go away, then at least move to a less conspicuously annoying position. Thanks, California, for sharing your astute observations!