Well, as previously mentioned (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/02/11/css-oddity/) there seemed to be a few problems with how the stylesheet for this blog actually presented the pages.

As CSS seems to be the bane of my life, I was resolved to trying various tricks and hack to get it working but no matter what, it always seemed to be a case of working in either IE or FireFox (never both, and rarely FireFox…) which was annoying to say the least.

Now, generally speakaing, FireFox often handles CSS in a more “standards compliant” manner. Because of this, I initially assumed the fault was with the CSS and IE was just “working round” it to show the page as intended. So, getting to work on the CSS, I tried a variety of combinations of background declarations, images, colours etc. All to no avail. Nothing I did solved the FireFox problem.

Basically speaking, in FireFox the image providing a pale background was AWOL and the menu items on the right were disjointed. In IE the background was there but the menu items had been shifted to the bottom of the page (making it VERY long).

After a while I gave up on the CSS and decided to investigate the oddness with the menu items (overlapping, not showing the correct entries etc.) and checked out the relevent section of sidebar.php

The bit of interest read as follows:

<h2>Digg.com News</h2>
<p><script type=”text/javascript” language=”JavaScript” /><br />
<script type=”text/javascript” /><br />
<noscript><a xhref=”http://del.icio.us/userid” mce_href=”http://del.icio.us/userid” >del.icio.us links</a></noscript>

Which, to my eyes, seems fairly straight forward and was based on the third party scripts that have worked perfectly well for the last six weeks.

Strangely, adding <?php /* … */ ?> tags around the above block has solved both the background (and other CSS issues) and the menu problems – with the obvious side effect of removing the del.icio.us and digg.com newsfeeds. At this time, I still have no idea what caused this or why it suddenly happened and can only assume it is something that has occured in the third party scrips.

If any one has any ideas I would love to hear them! 😀