I have been busy over the past couple of days working on stop on giving The Limelight a new, fresher, look. As a result, I haven’t had time to make as many posts. After many, many hours of work, and working out a bizarre bug in IE7, I think the result has been well worth it. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what you think.

As for that IE7 bug? Well for some reason after tweaking all my CSS, certain pages in IE were rendering completely aligned to the left, as opposed to in the centre as they are supposed to. In other words, IE was not respecting my CSS rules for margins.

I was boggled because I had not made any major changes to the layout of the site, at least nothing that should have broken it in IE. Also, I could find no explanation for why some pages, namely the archives and search results, were rendering properly, while the main page and single post pages were rendering with messed up margins. I spent a long while comparing code between those trying to find the culprit to not avail.

Finally, accidentally, I removed an HTML comment (one of these <!–comment–>) from the top of of the pages and, bingo!, everything was working again. So it would seem that if you have a comment as the first line of your PHP page, IE gets totally confused and breaks your CSS. I haven’t tested this to see if it only happens in pages that are called from another page, as in WordPress themes, or if it also happens in stand alone pages, but it sure is annoying either way.

For the curious, here’s a sampling of what this site has looked like over the years: