Techincal Difficulties – Not a Nunavut Post – BEWARE (resolved)

EDIT: Update – The issue with this theme not showing images in tables properly has been resolved by the theme creator (with the help of WP support)  due to my steadfast persistence in badgering the powers that be. This post will eventually be removed or archived to avoid confusion.

Warning – If you’re here expecting a post that’s about a wonderful story or photography centering around the Iqaluit experience, this is not a read for you. This is a pseudo-rant / demonstration about the technical difficulties revolving around a  previous post of mine, this WordPress theme and the notorious Internet exploiter (aka Internet Explorer).

It was brought to my attention the other day that the post I made – The Roof is on Fire! – had some issues with the images that were being displayed or more rather, weren’t being displayed. I rarely use the storage space allotted here for images. I typically upload my images to Photobucket.com and link them to my posts. I’ve never encountered issues doing that here in the past until now. It seems to be that there is a perfect storm of events preventing certain coding tricks I use on here to not work in this particular blog. The first element of this freak event is Internet Explorer.

As a web designer I hate Internet Explorer. It’s the bane of my existence. It’s garbage and has it’s own set of rules and restrictions regarding how web elements are displayed. Most other browsers (such as Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and even Safari) follow along a similar programming model that displays everything the same way using web standard coding. IE uses Microcrap programming that forces you to employ exemptions exclusively for it. Bitching aside, the short of it is I use Firefox more often than not to not only post here but design as well. When I first posted the article, all of the images showed up properly in the editing module as well as the preview in Firefox. I use HTML tables to display my picture elements because they’re easy to manipulate here with some CSS and keeps everything nice and tidy. WordPress’ gallery option isn’t very customizable so I use this method in my personal blog often.

Here comes test #1. I checked my Mental Wasteland page in both Internet Explorer 8 and the latest version of Firefox. The images I have displayed there are in CSS manipulated tables. The pictures of my artwork are hosted on WordPress servers. The two pictures of the sink faucets way at the bottom I just added today and are linked from Photobucket and are in a table as well. Everything shows up fine in both browsers (for me at least).

Below are the exact same two picture of the faucet in the same table model I used over there. I only copy & pasted coding folks. no additional tweaking:

If you can’t see the table with the images above that’s probably because you’re using IE. I was logged into WordPress in both Internet Explorer & Firefox while writing this just so I could preview changes in both browsers. While Firefox displays the table with the images just fine, surprise surprise, Internet Explorer didn’t. Now I could be totally wrong about all of this which is why I would appreciate it very much if people would chime in with their visual experiences to all of this. My professional conclusion is that there’s something buggy about the theme we’re using here. It’s called “Andrea” by Lucian E. Marin. The theme used on my blog is Modularity Lite by Thad Allender. Considering both blogs are using the same exact piece of coding it leads me to believe it’s something to do with the CSS styling written for this particular theme. Like I said though I could be wrong.

Anyways let me know what you come up with so I know whether I have a legitimate complaint to bring forward or not. I prefer to exhaust all of my avenues of testing before I get to complaining. My reason for posting this here and not in my own blog is because my dang images work there. I just feel bad that people who were expecting images in this blog couldn’t see them properly because they choose to roll with an inferior browser so my apologies. The sooner I get this sorted out the quicker I can find a workaround for all you Explorer users out there… that or we’ll be ditching this theme.

Thanks.

PS…the spelling error in the title is intentional.