Adding Sitemeter

I WAS ABLE to pull it off in my other weblog first, so it is kind of an afterthought here.

Nonetheless, having a free webcounter like Sitemeter that tracks visitors and generates other useful statistics is an essential adjunct to the blogging experience.

Installing it in Blogger Beta is different now, thanks to the Page Elements function that treats it as a widget. The steps can be found here, which presumes one has already secured an account with Sitemeter.

Taking the pains in adding that widget somewhere in the blog is critical; as I belatedly discovered, Sitemeter only starts counting when it is already embedded as a script, not when an account is opened. In the case of my other blog, opportunity cost came at the price of three weeks of zero -- as in zilch, as in a big fat egg -- traffic when there were visitors who either dropped by and left instantly, managed to lurk around, or commented to their hearts' content.

But it's better late than never.:)

Fixing width issues in Internet Explorer

I'VE uninstalled Internet Explorer for a number of months now, so I use the local Windows Explorer to see how the Microsoft browser handles my other blog.

Early today, I did the same with this test blog: a critical afterthought considering that IE does not intuitively understand the logic of my 3-column template design, unlike Mozilla Firefox. (Another proof of the latter's hands-down superiority.) As a result, my blog posts spill over into the right sidebar.

After checking how my two sidebars were structured, I identified the absence of a width declaration in the blogpost wrapper. Defining the best width through trial and error, and saving it in my code, zapped the problem away. The test blog still looks jagged and worn out in IE, but it definitely looks better. Yet it cannot compare with how Firefox renders the whole thing.

Testing image

WILL posting an image work in my new template? I am as eager to find out.

So, here goes nothing...