If content is king, let it have the first seat
March 19th, 2007 11:41:07 am pst by 
Sterling Camden
For the sake of my readers (that’s you) I have modified the themes on both Quips and Tips to display the sidebars after the content (thanks to Shelley for the suggestion). That way, if one of the third-party scripts in the sidebar takes an inordinate amount of time to load (I’m looking at you, Criteo) you can already be enjoying my breathtakingly profound wisdom, blissfully unaware of the thousands of little IP packets busily scurrying back and forth in uncomplaining silence as they construct the massive edifice that my sidebar has become.
I’ve noticed only one anomaly since this change: if the posts aren’t as long as the sidebar, the sidebar overwrites the footer. I’m using position:absolute with right:0 to slap the sidebars up on the right side, and the containing div section acts like it’s completely ignorant of how much vertical real estate the sidebars occupy. Anyone have any suggestions on how to solve that one?
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Just use float:right and float:left?
sorry, misunderstood the problem.
do a model like this:
div header
div main
– div content
– div sidebar
div footer
and then use float:left and float:right on content and sidebar.
That sounds so simple it might just work, engtech. The trick is, I want the content to take all the space not used by the sidebar, but I should be able to enforce that with a right margin. Thanks!
Unfortunately, on Firefox it looks like trying to use a right margin to size the “content” div down still causes the “sidebar” div to float below the bottom of the “content” div — even if there’s plenty of room for it (it works fine on IE7).
Actually, IE7 breaks also if the content div contains any div’s.
For an example, see http://chipsquips.com/test.html
The changes you made seem to have disrupted the ever-so-easily-to-disrupt Technorotteny. I look at incoming links and see a ton from you on posts that didn’t have any links. The technorati bot be confused
As for suggestions to fix the sidebar too long situation, you could show the sidebars based on word count (less words, less and/or trimmed down sidebars). That’s what I’ve done on a few blogs, but that’s a template hack, not a plugin. Might be a little messier than you want to be, not sure.
Hey TD, thanks for the suggestion.
Re: “Technorotteny” (heh) my search results for incoming links from them have been pretty rotten as well, so it could be just them being screwy. Or it could be that they’ve picked up the link in the sidebar from my blogroll widget, which is displayed on every page.
Another factor could be either one of the MyBlogLog or AutoRoll widgets — they could each contain a link to you that later gets pushed off the end of the list.