What a div!
Sunday, January 13th, 2008 
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Here I am at 5am and I feel like screaming from the rooftops with joy. I finally located the </div> that has been messing up my code and causing me nothing but frustration and anger for the past half hour.
I’m no expert coding whizz but I love designing and coding my own sites. I’m easily bored and have a redesign more often than I have Sunday dinners, something which I’m going to stop doing if I actually want to start getting traffic and money! I’m self taught in HTML, CSS and bits of PHP learning from tutorials on the web, e-books and lots of trial and error fun. But it’s frustrating as hell.
My biggest peeve is Internet Explorer. I can spend a few hours lovingly coding a site and previewing it in my browser of choice, Firefox, where it looks perfect. I switch to Internet Explorer and suddenly my site has chunks missing, features overlapping and whatever else IE decides to break my site with. This very site is a perfect example; the sidebar looks fine in Firefox but IE prefers to insert a chasm of space between each link. I think I’ve finally worked out that the issue is down to the line-height property.
Tonight I’ve been working on what will eventually be my biggest site and I’m sick of serving the minorities. I try and keep my sites to an 800px frame for those that still use the ridiculously magnified resolution but the site I’m working on requires three good sized columns and that won’t happen in an 800px frame. I’m going to make it relatively liquid, but if Amazon don’t keep to an 800px frame (go to Amazon, switch your display to 800px and notice the scrollbar at the bottom of the window), there should be little issue.
This site has more <div>s than I care to mention, and WordPress likes to throw in a few unnecessary (in my opinion) <div>s for extra measure. I make one small change, the sidebar disappears and I have to spend the next half hour counting how many <div>s are actually closed, checking sizes, margins, padding and all that malarkey. Perhaps I’m stupid, perhaps I put too much work into it but in the end I come out victorious. I have a nice three column site that works and now needs many more hours to put in content and optimise for SEO….
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