New Blog Template and Styling

Last Thursday, I mentioned a problem that would occasionally occur with the formatting on my blog posts (but only when viewing the default page -- listing the most recent posts -- and not when viewing individual posts). Tonight I thought I should spend a little more effort trying to resolve the issue.

However, rather than trying to come up with a CSS hack to avoid the problem with viewing multiple posts (when one of the posts contains a long line of preformatted text), I decided instead to see if the problem was specific to the Community Server template that I was using.

Over the last few months, I've noticed more and more MSDN bloggers switching over to a new look-and-feel based on the recently overhauled MSDN site (in anticipation of the recent launch of Visual Studio 2010). I first noticed the new styling on Jim Lamb's blog, and since then I've seen numerous other MSDN blogs updated with similar styling.

Tonight I switched my blog from the default template in Community Server to the Simple - right sidebar template. I then snarfed the custom CSS from Jim's blog [thanks, Jim!], pasted it before the custom CSS rules I had previously created for my blog, and then made a few tweaks (for example to use a width of 960px instead of 900 for the content).

After checking the new layout over a little bit, I decided to keep the change in place. I confirmed the issue with some posts scrolling off the right side of the page is now a thing of the past, although I also noticed that I'm getting horizontal scrollbars in some of the code blocks that weren't there before. [This is one of the biggest trade-offs when switching from a fluid layout (e.g. the default Community Server template I was using before) to a fixed layout (e.g. the "Simple" template that I'm now using along with the corresponding CSS rules to constrain the width of the content.]

Over the next few days, I'll tweak the formatting a little to resolve the new layout issues.