After an embarrassingly simple little fix, the site now looks pretty good in IE6. There’s still a minor rendering issue that grates on my nerves, but at least the sidebar finally lives in the right place on the page when viewed with older browsers.

Of course, you should still update/upgrade/change your browser for all the reasons mentioned below.

It’s come to my attention that this Web site – which I think looks quite fetching, by the way – does not look attractive at all when viewed in old versions of Internet Explorer. It’s just fine when using the new IE7, which is much closer to being compliant with current Web-coding standards than its predecessors. The site also looks great in alternative browsers like Opera and Firefox, two programs that helped write the book on standards-compliance. But IE6? Alas, no. IE6 does nasty things to the sidebar and completely messes up certain other behaviors. In IE6 this site is, to use the vernacular, totally borked.

I’m going to study up on the arcane sub-field of Web development known as “IE hacks” — an array of tricks you can use to make IE6 (and IE 5 and IE4) behave properly — and with any luck, this site will someday look perfectly acceptable, even when viewed with an antiquated browser.

In the meantime, may I recommend one of the free downloads listed below? Any one of them is preferable to IE6. They’re more stable. They’re faster. They’re packed with many more features. They’re more standards-compliant. And most important, they are much, much more secure than IE6 could ever hope to be.

Check out one of them, or check out all of them. You won’t be sorry.

Firefox 2

Opera 9.1

Internet Explorer 7

For an old guy, I’ve been getting into a surprising amount of Web 2.0 stuff lately. Bookmarks on del.icio.us. Bloglines and Google Reader accounts. Even a myspace page, set up in a moment of weakness last year, when I was struck with a sudden fear that the whole world would be using myspace some day and I’d better reserve my username in a hurry. (For the record, I set up my page and haven’t been back since, except to visit a few writers’ and musicians’ blogs that I enjoy following.)

Why am I doing all these things? Beats me. It’s nothing more than curiosity, I suppose. If you hear enough people talking about the same things long enough, you’ll eventually cave in and check them out for yourself.

In all honestly, I’ve been put off by a lot of the Web 2.0 buzz, which seems like nothing more than hype-in-hyperdrive. But I find myself liking the technology a lot.

After years of using many different RSS aggregators – various Outlook plug-ins, Firefox Live Bookmarks and Sage, and Opera’s built in reader – I didn’t quite understand the benefit of having a third party gather my news and store it online. I’m still not sure I get it completely, but I will admit it’s handy to have access to all the same feeds on all the different computers that I use, no matter where or when I use them. Of the two services I use, I like Bloglines a little better than Google Reader. It seems a bit more casual and homespun, while also performing a little smoother and swifter, at least on my machines. Both are pretty nifty, however, and if you’re thinking of trying a Web-based service, I could enthusiastically recommend either.

Del.icio.us was another one that initially baffled me, a philosophy I just couldn’t comprehend for a very long time. You use a Web browser to surf, right? And every Web browser saves your bookmarks or favorites, right? So why do you have to keep those same bookmarks online? Then I tried del.icio.us and pretty much fell in love with it right away. As with newsfeeds, it’s very handy to have all your bookmarks in sync at all times, no matter where you are. I like the tagging system, too — it makes so much more sense than endless folder hierarchies. And I absolutely love the ability to search through the millions of bookmarked sites that other users have shared. Sometimes those are the most interesting, enlightening, entertaining and helpful searches you can do – and they are available to everyone, even if they don’t have a del.icio.us account.

I doubt I’ll ever take the leap and abandon my “Web 1.0” life completely. As an example, I still use a built-in feed reader to keep me abreast of the four or five sites I need to follow on a timely basis, since it dumps the stories right into my e-mail as soon as they arrive; I don’t need to go to Bloglines or Goggle and read through a long list of 150 stories from 35 different feeds to find them. And I imagine I’ll still bookmark most critical sites on my various computers, just so they’re always right there at my fingertips. But I’ve still delved farther into the social Internet than I ever thought I would, and so far, it’s been a pretty interesting trip.