I’ve been surfing through quite a lot of tweetheads at Twitter, and adding a few of them as friends, but for some reason the number of friends for my profile stayed the same no matter how many people I added. I chalked this up for being a time delay before the server updated my profile, but I finally had the presence of mine to try it again using IE7 instead of Firefox.

Yep, you guessed it, adding friends doesn’t work if you’re using the Firefox browser. Not only that, you can’t delete tweets either. WT*??

Give me a flipping break Twitter. Are you guys such anal fart knockers that you can’t even make your website standards compliant for REAL browsers?? Get a fricking clue already you schmucks.

Sheesh, 20 minutes of my life wasted and now I have to do it all over again.

After putting up Google ads on my blog, I noticed scrolling in Firefox seemed to get choppy when the text ads came into view, but when they weren’t scrolling was smooth as usual. Great, another bug I needed to hunt down. I can just forget about getting any sleep this week. Web design, @#$%!

Fortunately though, I got lucky and found out a line in my stylesheet ( background-attachment: fixed; ) turned out to be the culprit. I removed it and presto, the scrolling problem cleared up. My background stayed exactly the same afterwards, so apparently I didn’t even need it there. One of these days I’m gonna get a book on CSS so I can finally figure out what in God’s name I’m putting in my stylesheets. Even now I still can’t get a handle on floats and how they work. But I mean really, float this people. Sheesh.

But anyways, happy to see this irritating bug had quickly been squashed, I surfed back to my blog to double check… and saw an ad for cosmetics staring me right in the face.

What the…? Hellooooo, what happened to relevant ads, Google dudes???

Then it got worse. After refreshing the page a few times, an ad for John McCain’s presidential campaign showed up.

OMG get it off my blog, get it off get it off getitoff!!!! AHHHH!!!!!!!!

I furiously clicked as fast as I could to my Adsense account and read up on how I could filter out some of these ads. Let me tell ya, Google’s Competitive Ad Filter… sux… rocks. You can’t use keywords or even perform a search for ads you’d like to screen. Instead you basically have to check the link properties of a particular ad (since you can’t click on them), and then check out where it links to so you can add the originating site to the filter list. Unfortunately Google’s redirection script turns each link into a 300 mile long streak of cryptic nonsense, so you have to carefully scroll through it until you find the originating URL. This is what I have to go through to keep my blog from advertising lipstick. Good grief, I may as well start subscribing right now to Glamour and Vogue magazines.

Though now that I think about it, my fingernails could use a really good manicure… ohhhhh crap.

I’m serious, the government needs to declare all of Microsoft a terrorist group, because quite frankly they are more of a threat to mankind than Al Qaeda is right now.

I was polishing up up my blog when I happened to noticed the colors I changed for a particular table wouldn’t take for some reason in Microsoft’s newest bundle of pure joy, IE7. No matter, since it didn’t affect the layout or anything… but then I glanced down and also happened to notice this HUGE horizontal bar on the bottom scrolling out for maybe half a mile before it ended. Oh no. No no no no…..

It wasn’t showing up in Firefox or IE6, so I knew this was an issue relating to IE7. Just beautiful. Worse yet, as I surfed around my blog using IE7, I noticed a few other things were breaking as well. Why, oh why, did I harbor the hope that maybe, just ONCE, IE7 would somehow prove not to be yet another disastrous release that would cause web designers everywhere to curse and spit at any and all things relating to Microsoft? I had thought IE7 would be just enough of an improvement over IE6 (which itself gave me endless hours of grief) that I wouldn’t have to pay it any mind when coding my blog.

Nope nope nope. IE7 promptly decided to treat my blog like a public restroom, hosing everything down in its path, but in just clever enough a manner that I wouldn’t notice it right away. And now because of those nice folks in Seattle who curiously enough also liked to worship Satan in their spare time, I had to deal with this mile long horizontal bar that was apparently stretched out to cover some 4th dimensional object residing on my blog, seemingly invisible to the naked eye.

So, with the clock striking midnight, I resolved to work this through until I figured out what was causing the problem. What would follow would be a series of deleting/adding code, uploading the modified file, refreshing my page, checking the results, then rinse, wash and repeat. I continued on this neverending cycle until 4AM, when I finally tossed in the towel and crashed on my bed, muttering curses at Microsoft, then sleeping and dreaming that I was muttering curses at Microsoft. I finally woke up around 11AM, somewhat refreshed and ready to pick up where I left off.

After another hour or so of googling for answers, uploading code and swearing yet another blue streak at Microsoft, I finally found an answer. The reason my horizontal bar spanned on to infinity was because the numbers I used to list comments in numerical order were in…. italics.

That’s it. No other reason. Because my comment numbers were in italics, IE7 in its unending wisdom decided it needed to create a horizontal bar that could be wrapped around the earth three times because somehow, that just makes it all better.

I hate those Microsoft coders. I hate them. I hate their mothers, I hate their wives, I hate their children, I hate their pets, I HATE THEM. There are not enough fleas in this universe to infest the armpits of those hacking terrorists to my liking. I long await the day when the earth will open up and swallow the entire Microsoft campus whole, while angels in heaven sing and rejoice over the destruction of the greatest evil the world has ever known, at least ever since the invention of disco.

But in the meantime, I must continue to fight off these demons from infesting my blog, and lend my hand in some small way to assist those who have also been afflicted by this plague of mankind. So here it is: I noticed this problem also occured in those running Wordpress blogs using the Tiga theme. If this describes you, check an individual page where at least one comment has been made (in IE7 of course) to see if you get the horizontal bar as well. To fix, simply change the font style in the class “comment-num” to something other than italic, OR add the line “overflow: hidden” to the class comment header in your Tiga stylesheet. That should resolve the problem.

Fortunately, the other IE7 related issues were easily solvable, and I managed to clean them up just in time to see the sun set in the sky, yet another day stolen from me because of those evil snotbags in Seattle. *Sigh*

I think it’s obvious web design is definitely not for me. I had to do all this with only a rudimentary understanding of CSS, PHP and XHTML, and things have gotten a wee bit more complicated since I built my first webpage back in ‘97. Ahhhh the good old days, where you could throw some text up, wrap them in a font tag and low and behold, you had a webpage comparable to Yahoo. Now it can suck up all my time just to figure out what relative and absolute positioning means, and why it’s making my blog look like a pile of moose droppings. I can either spend all my time building and maintaining a blog, or I can spend it blogging for real, but I surely can’t do both. I think the time will eventually come when the technology will be so far over my head that I’ll have no choice but to use a service like Typepad just to avoid the chores and anguish of building and maintaining my own blog. It’s kind of sad, but what can I do. I don’t intend to go down without a fight though, so while I can still dance, I say, bring on the NOISE.