www.hans-eric.com

I haven’t been happy with the way code snippets look on my blog. Yesterday I decided to do something about it, but, which is typical me, the number of changes got a lot more than I set out for, including a WordPress upgrade and a new theme.

After a couple of minor layout and style sheet changes, I was satisfied with the new look – in Firefox that is; When I tested it in Internet Explorer 6.0, I noticed that the content of the sidebar got displaced when there were code snippets in a post.

With a little investigation, I discovered that the triggering factor of this annoying bug was the following css rule, or more precisely, the padding property.

code{
  font:1.2em 'Courier New',Courier,Fixed;
  display:block;
  overflow:auto;
  text-align:left;
  margin: 10px 0 10px 0;
  background: #FBF5DF;
  border-top: solid 1px #EDE0B3;
  border-bottom: solid 1px #EDE0B3;
  padding: 5px 10px 5px 10px;
}

When I changed it and removed the right hand side padding, the problem went away.

code{
  font:1.2em 'Courier New',Courier,Fixed;
  display:block;
  overflow:auto;
  text-align:left;
  margin: 10px 0 10px 0;
  background: #FBF5DF;
  border-top: solid 1px #EDE0B3;
  border-bottom: solid 1px #EDE0B3;
  padding-left: 5px;
  padding-top: 10px;
  padding-bottom: 10px;
}

One may wonder how an internal space property like padding could have this effect on the positioning of other objects, but then again, I’m not surprised. I can see why Internet Explorer is not the favorite browser among web designers, or among you for that matter.

Anyway, I hope you like the new looks of my blog; If you don’t, please let me know.

Cheers!

SEO is obviously something that is occupying a lot of people’s minds nowadays. Digg and other community websites are full of posts with the three-letter abbreviation. The challenge is to outsmart the search engine algorithm so that your content (well, ads) will show amongst the first search results. The number of SEO experts out there are legio, but so are the skeptics. Alastair Revell, for instance, thinks that all you need is a good grip of basic web design.

“What I believe is that writing search engine optimised pages is part and parcel of good web design and not a black art to be practised by specialists.”

I agree with Alastair on this. To me, SEO with the sole purpose of climbing as high as possible on the Google ladder, is a lot like cheating. It’s like skipping a cue. The effect is that more legitimate content could be pushed downwards. The problem then, is that if some does it, everyone needs to follow or lose their legitimate rank.

A parallel can be drawn to driving in big cities: in order to prevent cars from behind to pass and take your place, you need to keep a short distance to the car in front. This way of driving use up more fuel than necessary. It requires you to accelerate faster, and break more often than what is optimal. The same is true for SEO. The time you spend on optimizing search engine results is waste in the sense of content quality.

Instead of worrying about duplication or other SEO related problems, your time is better spent on improving content and users’ experience. In my opinion, that is the only way to be a long-term winner in the Search Engine Game.