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The awesome i3theme that this blog uses is a treat to the eyes, except to a lot of IE6 users. The issue is that for many people viewing wordpress blogs using this theme, the right sidebar doesn’t appear on the right, but below the middle column main area.
I didn’t know this problem existed as I don’t use IE but when a friend mailed to let me know, I started hunting around for the solution. Infact, found on the home page of i3theme, that the author acknowledged this bug and fixed it in v1.5, except the fact, that the fix doesn’t work. Because this blog was also using the same version.
Now, not taking anything away from the author, who has done a wonderful job with the theme, I took it upon myself to fix it, and the solution turned out to be really simple.
The first thing I noticed was the “tag cloud”. Since many of my posts are tagged “Windows Mobile”, this particular tag had become pretty big, so much so that it was being cut off by the left sidebar boundary. But when I viewed the site in IE, it showed the full tag, but the last 2 letters were jutting out of the left sidebar. which caused the middle area to shift towards right ever so slightly, nudging the right sidebar towards the bottom in the process.
Hmm, this was the reason that many people never see this problem because they may have a particularly balanced blog (or with shorter tags) where one particular tag does not go out of the boundaries.
The solution as anyone can guess now is to keep that tag within its range. Now, I call my solution as a hack or a workaround because ideally, we should be able to create a method to make the tag “word wrap” inside the edges. But since I was unable to get this done, I chose a simpler way. Make the tag small enough so that it fits 
Now, how are we going to do this. Wordpress uses a template tag called “wp_tag_cloud” to generate the tag cloud. (Usage: <?php wp_tag_cloud(’); ?>)
Now, this tag takes, amongst various other parameters, the values for the largest and smallest font size used for the cloud. So, what all we have to do is find the tag and pass the appropriate parameter. So, without further ado, here are the steps:
1) Go to the path: <wordpress install root>/wp-includes/widgets.php.
2) Search for the function “wp_widget_tag_cloud”.
3) change the call “wp_tag_cloud();” to “wp_tag_cloud(‘largest=17’);”, without the quotes. You may need to expermient with the number you pass as argument according to your tags.
4) Now, save the file and reload the blog in any IE window and you are done. (Delete the cache first if you are using a cache plugin).
Let me know if this worked for you.
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Quote of the day: Morpheus: Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
February 8th, 2008 at 7:17 am
This is a great fix….. altho.. wouldn’t it be better to devise a way for words to wrap properly when they become too large?
February 8th, 2008 at 9:50 am
yes, Marty, it’d be much better if we could have word wrap, but so far I’ve not been able to achieve that as my skills with wordpress/php are pretty limited right now..
February 11th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
Hey Thanks for the tip!
May I know how do you get google ads to display in the sidebar like you did? Mine dont appear if I use the Text Box and paste in the code.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
Hey Edgar
Did you try to see the ad immediately after adding the code? It generally takes anywhere between 5-20 minutes for the ads to start showing up…
April 6th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
[...] II) Blogging, Hack Add comments My Sites: My Blog | My Tech Blog—-Some time back I had posted a little hack to fix an issue that users of i3theme have, i.e., their right sidebar drops to below the main [...]