I don't know if this is in any way connected with the Captain's return to grace and ability to see the Forum graphics, but I was using IE to view the main site today, and I noticed the page content was not being placed in the correct place - I doubt there really is a connection, but I'd be interested to know what you are seeing.

The correct appearance of the main site is as it appears in Firefox, namely the Navigation panel on the left, and the main content panel that occupies most of the page, should both be aligned at their tops, and be spaced about one line below the image at the head of the page.

This is fine in Firefox, but IE is placing the main content panel almost immediately beneath and and touching the header image - which is not right.

I haven't been changing anything concerning this recently, but the placement is a long standing issue with IE behaviour being incorrect. The styling had been ok until I noticed this, and was usually unnoticeable, with the error on position only being about 1 pixel, which I could live with, however 10 pixels or so is 10 to many.

Any feedback appreciated.

I see much the same difference as you do.  In Firefox the navigation and content boxes are ALMOST aligned but in IE7 the contents box touches the picture and the navigation box is about a quarter of an inch below.  On Firefox the Contents' Page section is shaded in a light blue whereas in IE7 it seems to be white.  The text is different too.

I know that IE7 is the one I use and am used to but I don't mind the discrepancy of levels at the top, nor the white back ground to contents and I much prefer the font in IE7 as it is much easier to read.  I doubt if anyone else has a problem with it.  I am tempted to say "It ain't broke so don't fix it!"

How much of a problem would it be to rotate the photographs used in the header?  It occurs to me that people coming to the site for a further visit might get more of an impression of changing and updated information if not presented with the same pics all the time.  Perhaps a " Site last updated XXXXXX" banner might be worth considering.  We know that it is updated almost every day but visitors don't.  The other alternative might be to have a last updated banner on every page.

The footer appears on nearly every page (menus and lists are excluded), same as Wikipedia, and always has the update data for the page.

The site structure and hosting arrangements largely preclude the automation of pic rotation, I just don't have the space or bandwidth needed to do this, so have never really looked into it, sorry.

The thought is pencilled away though, and I'll keep an eye out for any system recipes that might do the same.

I did try using the toys built into Photobucket once, only problem was that the all the clever image stuff made the page take too long too load first time round, and the animated versions just became irritating after while. txtspk teens might like animated stuff continually blitzing their retinas 24/7, I don't, and I suspect our readership would soon tire of it too. Since you're addicted to IE, you'll be missing the real high speed action with the animation of the fading S that shows on our Firefox tabs

I assume the page contains a link to photobucket or similar.  Could not a different couple of pics be linked in each month?  This would show returning visitors that the site had moved on.

Noted the above thoughts on the pics, and it is possible to include other pics on the home page (assuming this is the location you were discussing for these changing pics).

There are a few positive and negative issues:

On the plus side, the coding involved will accept the Photobucket addresses for the images, so anything that is used within the site can be used. Without going into too much detail this is important because inbuilt security normally prevents external urls from being used in this way, since a malicious user could insert their whole web site here, unchecked.

On the minus side, the list of pics that would be used or would be able to appear has to be assembled manually. While it's no big deal for a few pics, it means that instead of using a pool of 1,000+ pics, the list of potential images is limited to how many I can be bothered typing into a controlling list.

There are a couple of options that came up when I looked at existing tricks that will work inside the site.

Simplest, but requiring regular intervention, is a manually prepared selection of images, changed at regular interval. This means someone (ie me) punching in the urls of new images every day, week, fortnight, month or whatever. Fine if I remember, not so fine if I forget or can't be bothered.

Alternatively, I can prepare a longer and slightly more complicated pic list, and a random pic would be drawn from it for display every time the page the random image markup was included on. This would mean a different pic every time the page was visited, but I suspect I could add some date dependence to the code to make the change dependent on the day/week/month or something similar.

Those who program will probably have noticed the flaw. Namely that a control list has to be prepared manually, even for the random option. What should happen is that I simply tell the code where the pics are stored, and it goes off and picks whatever it wants from the location. As far as I can see, that option only comes to life if I host the images (which I can't). I may be wrong, and probably am, but I and sure there are no existing code examples I can find that will work with images not hosted in the same domain - again, it's a security and anti-hacking measure.

I've tracked down the screen element that IE doesn't like, and reconfigured a couple of elements around it to eliminate the positioning error so that IE shows the page content in the desired position.

This change actually leads to the noticing of another layout problem that affects pages that don't have the row of tabs along the top, which get placed 2 pixels too high on the page, however, this is because of the way the placement is made when the tabs are killed, so while it means the alignment is not perfect, it also means that it's just a layout 'problem', not a browser error, so both Fx and IE now look the same.

Since I don't really want to much around with the core layout any more than necessary (many of these sorts of fiddle get overwritten and have to be recreated if there is an upgrade to the core), so since it only affects a handful of pages that don't show tabs, and isn't really noticeable if you don't know it's there, it's not likely to be tweaked out - unless I'm really stuck for something to do in the dead of winter.

But it is nice to be rid of that offset page content in IE.

No one who uses IE7 will notice I assure you - I never did even with the occasional venture into Fx.

Oh, I know, but I have the disadvantage of being in command of where things land on the page, and telling the browser where to put them, and when one of them decides to say "shan't", well.. it's a bit like waving the old reg flag in front of a bull (even if its's the waving, and not the colour, that produces the final result).

It's a bit like having to look in that one broken mirror that might be in your house. You know what should be there, and can make allowances, but you also know it's eventually got to be dealt with one day.

Site seems a bit strange this morning.  The font is minute.  I can scarcely read it.  There are aalso some missing lines on the Forum.   Are we still in "limp hame mode"  or is it at my end?

Afraid it seems to be your end

All was well here at 2 am, and all that happened at source was that it was "switched off".

All I can suggest is is the old faithful of a full Off/On of computer and software to flush out any oddities that may have been cached when the site was summarily extinguished, and to do the Shift-F5 (or Ctrl-F5) routine to clear the browser's cache.

It was OK on FF but I have just noticed that the screen was set to 75% magnification.   Reverting it to 100% has cured the poblem.  Will it come back when I restart?  I have no idea.

Should be fine - whatever magnification you set should be remembered.

Quick way to get to "normal" is to hit Ctrl-0