[?] What a TEMPLATE is, and tech notes

Listen people: we are going to use jargon from time to time on the blog, okay? JAR-gun. For our purposes, "jaragon" is technical language necessary to convey contextual meaning for esoteric subjects.

To wit: "template". The "template" for the blog is the set of commands blogspot.com uses to tell your browser how to draw the content of my blog. The "templates" are not the neat comic book images I have pilfered to make it all pretty -- it's stuff like the red sidebar and the red datebar and the way the shopping cart (you haven't been buying much lately, have you? I've been meaning to talk to you about that ...) rolls down the left side of the page. That's the template, and that's what has been giving me fits this week.

OK, it has been giving me fits since I started blogging, but that's not my point.

For the record, before I get saliva foam all over my keyboard here, let me link to and thank Daniel Sorensen for his tireless work in trying to make the wretched machine do what it is being told to do. I have no idea if he is blogging readables or screed, but go visit him just to say "thanks for stopping cent from stepping in front of a bus over the blog template. Nice work."

For those of you who wish I had stepped in front of said bus, nuts to you, fella.

OK. So you can see the current results of the template battle because it has been updated and it loaded when you loaded the page. If you have the evil hellspawn MSIE and cannot be coerced into entering 2006, you will see this:



Note the unseemly blockiness and the lousy way it renders the page so as to make me look like I can't code or have never read up on design elements.

If you are a rational and somewhat-smug internet user, and you are enjoying the competence of FireFox, you are seeing this:



Very nice.

As you can see, BOTH BROWSERS CENTER UP! W00T! In fact, go ahead and make your window scalable, and ride the size back and forth -- THE CONTENT STAYS IN THE CENTER! oh booyah.

Now, how did I do it? Tables. All this time I'm monkeying with div's and all I had to do was force the divs into position using tables and I got 95% of the work done. yes, yes -- you MSIE users are very proudly reading this week's issue of TIME with Bill Gates pretending that he has something in common with Bono and thinking, "I sure am cool that I run my iPod on my PC and I have an integrated browser that comes with my operating system. If only Cent would stop pretending he knows something about css and cave in and use a template that MY browser can handle, the world would actually be a better place."

Listen: when I get the template problem solved so that the MSIE user gets the same thing the Firefox user gets, I'm going to start having lunch with the President in the White House mess just like Bono does, and THEN where will you be? Huh? You'll be wondering if I can change President Bush's mind about immersion, I am sure.