The power of perseverance

Jan 24, 2006

The power of perseverance is amazing and it solves many seemingly unsolvable problems. I need to re-launch my content writing website with a totally revamped layout to make it more SEO-friendly and standards compliant, to make it more CSS-based, and to give it a more neat look. Now, the Internet Explorer has its own quirks while dealing with CSS layouts. Since a majority of my visitors still use the IE to browse the Internet, no matter how much I want to create designs just for FireFox I have to make sure that the layouts look decent in both the browsers.
So anyway, something was screwing up the layout completely in IE. I don’t use the “IE hacks” prevalent in the designer community due to two reasons: (1) I don’t know how to use them; (2) If someday Microsoft decides to sort out the issue, all those hacks will have to be removed. Instead, I programmatically check what browser the visitor is using, and then load the browser-specific CSS file. Sounds tedious? Believe me, it is much, much better than writing those cryptic hacks. No matter what I did, the DIVs would either run helter-skelter or wouldn’t align. I started working on the problem at 1:30 AM in the morning, gave up at 6:40 AM, and then again resumed at 2:00 PM. Finally I was able to do what I wanted to do by 5:00 PM.
There is a reason why I talk about perseverance here. I’m completely comfortable with the conventional form of creating HTML layouts using nested tables. All my old websites have been fairing well in the search engines too. But this time I had decided that I won’t launch the new design unless it is totally CSS-based. My forthcoming business direction depends on this launch so I’m in a hurry. I want to finish the website and upload it on to a new server while making sure that old links are not found missing (another long story) because they rank well on Google and Yahoo. In the 8 hours while I spent time trying to find how to write those 4 extra lines to make the layout behave I could have finished the layout part and started porting the content to the new server. Add to that the client deadlines. Also add to that the freezing cold that was hurting the knuckles while I typed-tested-deleted-typed-tested while the neighborhood cat gave out the mating calls — they were the indeed the mating calls. It became like a pressure-cooker and there was an overwhelming desire to chuck all this and revert back to something I was totally comfortable with. But I kept trying. And eventually I solved the problem.
I’ve many times tested the power of perseverance and it has always worked for me.