Fixing the Default Wordpress theme for IE
When I saw my beautiful Wordpress blog pages being distorted by Internet Explorer (IE) and not in Firefox (my browser of choice) I immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was a CSS issue.
The problem was occuring on pages that display the ‘latest blog posts‘. There were some instances where one blog entry excerpt would send the following ones ‘out of kilter’ (see picture - click to enlarge).
I, once, read an angry blog that berated IE for making the blog author’s website look ugly. I remember thinking about commenting to let the author know that it was his responsibility to make his site work with IE and not the other way around. This experience (coupled with the fact that I had tried different Wordpress themes that worked OK) made me assume that it was a CSS glitch within the default Wordpress theme.
I detest fiddling with CSS. It is a chore and causes me great pain with the way browsers display CSS differently. So, I did not even start to try to fix the “ugly page problem” and let it stay lingering.
Today I added some Google Adwords ads to this site and happened to check to see how my website looks on IE. So, finally, I was embarrassed enough to care about how my site looks to IE users.
A quick analysis of the “view source” code on the problem page showed that it was nothing to do with CSS at all.
The whole thing was being caused by an unclosed <a> tag that had been cut off by my the_excerpt_reloaded Wordpress plugin (which is used to reduce the length of content shown on pages that list blog entries). Sorry IE - I just blame you for everything! The reason why I was blaming the default Wordpress theme was because I had never bothered to implement the excerpt plugin when I tested the other themes in comparison. So, my apologies to the Wordpress default theme too!
It is strange to see this occurring because the final, “fix tags”, argument in the the_excerpt_reloaded calls should default to TRUE.
The quick fix solution to my problem was to go and reduce the “excerpt_length” argument in the excerpt reloaded call to reduce the chances of breaking a tag. Then, I rewrote any blogs that were still broken in order to force any broken tags to become whole again when in ‘excerpt mode’.
When I have more time will go through the excerpt reloaded instructions and add the final argument “fix tags” to see if it works.