• Facebook Maintenance, Working on posts

My Facebook profile is currently being held hostage by Facebook developers as they perform "maintenance." I get the classic screen showing that my profile will be back up in a few hours. Even my Fan Page is affected. It's been like this since early this afternoon, so it is obviously taking more than a few hours to deal with on their end. It's one thing for a personal user to have no access to Facebook, but as a blogger, this puts the screws to my ability to communicate with readers.


In terms of posts, I am still working on my Bandit 200 series review. Looks like a post on the Big Bite Baits Biobait Trick Stick might come out before the crankbait post, so keep in touch. I know I've been quiet lately. Lots going on in my life at the moment. I apologize to my regular readers for the delays. It's been hot here and I've been less than enthusiastic about fishing, but the water is also dropping, so the shallow stuff isn't holding as many fish.

• IE 6 Layout Problems Fixed

I periodically check to make sure my site loads properly in other browsers. My blog did not look right in IE 6. Although Internet Explorer 6 is an outdated browser, many visitors appear to still be using it. Even some government computers still have IE 6 installed. Because a significant number of visitors are still using IE 6, I figured I had better investigate and fix one problem with my layout.

Here's what was happening. The sidebar on the far right of the page was getting shifted down and out of alignment with the rest of the site. After doing some searching, it appears IE 6 does not render certain Blogger layouts properly to begin with. That's the price you pay for using an outdated browser.

However, I wanted to make sure this was the case, so I fiddled around with my template.

Being a Mac user on an equally outdated PPC system, I don't have access to a PC running IE 6 to do any tests. I have to resort to third party browser preview services like NetRenderer and Browsershots. Under IE 7, IE 8, and Firefox for Windows, my blog showed up fine. Under Firefox and Safari for Mac OS X, everything looked fine too.

So after diving into my template, I checked the sidebar width settings. Nope. That wasn't it. Being the tinkerer that I am, I expanded the width of my outer wrapper. Low and behold, that fixed it.

Hopefully visitors see what I see now.

• Going back to popup comments

The comment form was nice, but one bug has been getting on my nerves over the last few months. For anyone using their Google/Blogger account to leave a comment, they have to be logged in ahead of time. If they aren't logged in, it's impossible to log in via the comment form setup. The thing is, most of the time, these visitors aren't aware they are not logged in, so they write up a comment and post it without realizing what they just said disappears into oblivion.

So as of right now, I'm going back to the popup window style comment form. Hopefully logging in via that window works.

Let me know if there are any problems.

• Comment/Google Account Bug

I recently discovered that there is an apparent bug in the Blogger commenting system related to embedded comments. When anyone visits a Blogger blog and decides to post a comment via an embedded comment form, they are presented with a field to type their comment and a drop down menu to select an identity. The first one on the list in the drop down menu is Google Account.

If you are already logged in to Google, your username should show up automatically. If you are not signed into Google, "Google Account" is listed. If one decides to select Google Account, nothing happens. No options to log in are provided.

I suspect visitors have come to my blog and posted comments using this option only to have their well thought out post disappear into oblivion once they clicked the Post Comment button. I've seen more than a few comment-form entries in my StatCounter visitor log. I am fairly certain at least a few have been affected by this bug.

Other bass fishing bloggers use the embedded form, so I'm not the only one who is affected. Many other blogs on Blogger now employ the embedded form. I'm not sure how widespread the problem actually is, though.

I have modified the instructions above the comment form to let Google users know they need to be logged in first, but I'm still left with a difficult decision. Do I go back to the pop up window comment form? Do I stay with the embedded form? I don't know the answer to that question yet.