Yesterday evening I discovered, much to my dismay, that this blog does not always display properly. Well, a more accurate statement would be that it looks terrible if you’re using Internet Explorer as your browser (hey, get with the program and use Firefox). A couple months ago, a friend told me about his experience with a distorted presentation [Thanks, G-!], but I dismissed it as an anomaly, possibly attributable to a quirky laptop configuration. I guess not, because I can now reproduce the distortion consistently on a standard desktop. Sigh.

I’ve tried to resolve this issue by applying a different theme to the blog: what you’re seeing now is the fourth iteration, and although I’m not thrilled about it, at least it’s not embarrassingly bad. I first used “Thoughts 2.0” (Lisa Sabin-Wilson), but I couldn’t see my pages. Then for months I used a variation of the default called “UMass Kubrick 1.6” (Zinj Guo), but this is the theme that allows the IE distortion. I then went back to “WordPress Classic 1.5” (Dave Shea), but I can’t see my tagline. The current theme is “Regulus 2.2” (Ben Gillbanks), which I’m feeling is okay — it does allow for some customization, and maybe it will grow on me.

I began wondering if the photos I uploaded caused the page elements to display improperly — I may test this theory over the next few weeks. The photos I download from my digital camera are 640 X 480 pixels out of the box. There’s probably an optimum size, in pixels, for each blog template, but I haven’t figured that out yet. I’m using Picasa to edit the photos — this software does have functionality which allows me to re-size the photos as I wish. I’ll keep you updated on my progress toward the goal of a decent-looking blog (never mind the content, eh).