Headaches, grumblings, and laziness

Having the same problem as Meg, my host doesn’t give me stats on who you guys are and when you’re coming by. I’m curious, just like you. I enlisted the help of SiteMeter, a cheesy hit counter that actually goes a lot further and breaks down actually useful things like domain, OS, time zone, language, etc.

Problem being: while the javascript it spits out is more or less okay by the W3, Mozilla seems to think it doesn’t close a comment field properly. Hence, anything following it graciously vanishes without a trace until the next —> shows up. In this case, my entire right sidebar went AWOL, and broke a few more things on its way out the door.

Closing an extra comment that IE doesn’t think is open, of course, means we get the extra —> showing up on the page. No sweat: I’m being subversive and using a blocking DIV to cover up the meter anyway. If you look way down to the bottom of the page, about 2 lines below the space in “See all…”, hover your mouse until you get a link. See? Sneaky. Now you know my dirty little secret.

Netscape 7 now gives my site the thumbs up, IE remains happy, and even the W3C is playing along. I could take the easy way out and shift blame to the meter itself being the culprit, but it’s embarrassingly obvious that I didn’t test this redesign last week in anything other than IE6. Which goes to show that although a standard is a standard, you still have to check your work.

Lesson learned.