I think I might cry

My lovely wonderful website that has been working magically is currently under review by the web hosts to check for malicious content. the error page that appears says it will only take 2 - 4 hrs, but its been like that all day. PLEASE let that be sorted by tomorrow...freaking free web hosting...

Just can't stop...

Ok - i've solved the IE issue!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yayayayayayayayayay!

The separate css file did the trick. Plus I went and stuck a black border around all of my divs to work out exactly what the hell was going on. ie was adding the padding twice or something and completely throwing all divs out of place. Apparently this works differently on ie versions earlier than 7. I am testing my site on version 7 and all looks good there. I applied the Tanteck hack in the hope that it will also solve earlier ie version issues. won't know for sure until i find a machine with an earlier version. Will do for now though...
http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html

In fact, it looks better re alignment on the ie version now, so I'm going to go back and stick black borders on everything in the normal css file and see what it looks like. Should probably wait until I get home though so I can test on Safari at the same time.

This all being said, the site actually looks fine as it is right now in all the browsers I wanted it to work in. Perhaps I should just leave it and work on my actual assignment instead...that woudl make sense! I wonder if you ever feel like something like a site is ever 'finished'...

just taking notes...

Sites that have helped today:
http://bonrouge.com/br.php?page=faq#haslayout
which sent me to

http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html

In theory, my problem lies with the hasLayout issue. I tried a couple of their hacks, but it wasn't working for me. They did prompt me to thinking maybe I should just add in a separate style sheet for IE. Much cleaner solution...

The other good thing about this site was it helped me track down the Holly hack http://www.communitymx.com/content/article.cfm?page=1&cid=C37E0
which had disappeared from a couple of the other places i tried to track it down. I think the creators have written a book and want you to buy that instead...

It also helped me track down http://www.positioniseverything.net/articles/ie7-dehacker.html
which I'm sure is the page that Rustum had put forward with some solutions.

Better read that before just diving in and mucking around with new css files...

Ironing out the last few bits and bobs

OK, I've sorted the form re wording of pop up messages, formatted the text for the warning messages and sorted out the container sizes for the two side bars so everything now fits in without mucking up the rest of the page format.

I've checked the XHTML and CSS validity of all of the pages (and stuck my little sticker thing at the bottom of the pages). All good there.

Last thing off the bits and bobs list (and the biggest scariest one) is sorting out the IE issues. One of the things IE was doing (creative little beast) was sticking an outline around all of my image links. Got rid of that with some simple CSS (thanks to this handy site http://bonrouge.com/~faq)

Now I just have to work out how to sort out the way it stuffs around the text positioning on the page. I know its got something to do with the way its popping out the div sizes or margins or something. I noticed Rustum had posted a link on someone else's blog with what i think was the solution to this problem. Unfortunately I can't get into the dmt blog list site, the link's down or something. Time to trawl the brains trust i.e. google