No, there were no problems with IE9. That time was spent fixing this web page.

IE9 installed smoothly and looks nice and sleek, seems to run fast and I’m told is much improved over older versions of IE. Microsoft would like to forget IE6, I’m sure.

But, as always, Microsoft’s vision of how HTML should work is slightly different from everyone elses’. Actually, all the major browsers vary in small ways. But as soon as I viewed this blog in it, I noticed the font I am using for the titles didn’t load and the default font was displayed. A minor annoyance, but I wanted to see why it didn’t, what it would take to fix, and if it was still working in the other browsers I have.

First, a bit of technical background. Not every font is on everybody’s computer. You have installed the ones you like, but that doesn’t mean I have the same ones. There is a certain set of basic fonts that are common that are used for most web pages, and certain types of font categories that your display will fall back to even if those aren’t found.

But to be sure a special font is available to render a web page, they came up with a system of CSS Inline Fonts where custom fonts are specified in the style sheet of a web page and if not on your computer already, can be downloaded along with the web page. You may have noticed a small delay before the final font is displayed.

What I found out was IE9 is a little picky about how it does this and wants a certain type of font file that I wasn’t supplying. Fortunately, as with most things on the web, I didn’t need to figure this out on my own, someone had already done it and written it up online.

So, I spent four hours changing the mechanism that puts the fancy font on this blog. Reading up on what to do, getting the font converted to the new format, uploading the font files, debugging it all and testing it in four browsers.

Of course, it didn’t all just work right away. It immediately broke it in Firefox. I got that working again, but it still refused to work in IE9, even though it did work if I switched to compatibility mode. Odd.

I found out what I was doing wrong and fixed it, then found out it didn’t work in Chrome. Turns out that the theme I use in WordPress has a seperate stylesheet for Chrome and all I needed to do was make the same changes to it that I did for the normal stylesheet.

I then tried Opera. Of course, it had been so long since I used Opera that it insisted on installing a new version of it. At least the font worked.

Anyway, the blog now displays properly in all four browsers, IE9, Firefox 3.12, Opera 11 and Chrome whatever. I don’t know what version of Chrome I’m using because it updates itself on it’s own without consulting me and I never need to know!

I did find that, as far as the CSS Font loading is concerned, all the browsers were faster than Firefox, with Chrome and Opera seeming to be instantaneous. IE9 had a small delay, but Firefox has a noticeable delay while the file downloads. Of course, this may all be cosmetic, if they simply delay rendering the page until the font arrives and Firefox 4 may be just as quick. I haven’t tried it yet, even though the pre-release is available.

I was impressed with the amount of space the newer browsers give back to the actual web page. They are very stingy with how much screen real estate they use for menus and toolbars. Firefox 3.x seems dated and crowded by comparison. It doesn’t help that I’ve added a couple plugins that add to that, though.

I’ve stuck with Firefox so far because there is a small set of plugins, or Add-ons as they like to be called, that I simply can’t do without. Some of them are available for the other browsers too, but not every one. I’ve added Xmarks to IE9 and Chrome, so I have a common set of Bookmarks, but the password memory doesn’t seem to carry through. I have so many passwords to various sites that Firefox remembers and Xmarks backs up, that I just can’t function in a browser without them. I’m sure there is a solution, if I had to, though. I’m waiting until FF4 comes out to decide.

I did it first to another site and had experienced no problems. So I was feeling good about doing the same here and getting rid of the nagging notices that a newer version was available.

I did the upgrade by the book, including running all the backup scripts for the posts and data. Then let the script disable all the plugins I didn’t need for the upgrade. It upgraded the site and it all looked good. Until I tried to log in to the admin page.

For some reason, all the admin stuff was no longer working very well. I could log in, but only part of any page would show up. It was like it stopped partway.

I figured it was some problem with either a theme or a plugin. There are two ways to disable them. One is to go into the admin control panel and turn them off. But I couldn’t do that. The other way is to physically remove them from the file structure of the site. That I could do. I moved all the plugins and all the themes except for the default one to a different folder on the server.

The site worked and I got the admin pages back. So I thought it must be a particular item. I decided to move the plugins back one at a time. I never found one plugin that caused the problem. What I found was as more were loaded, the admin pages started stopping at different points as they loaded. It was like the more I added back the worse the problem got.

It turns out that there is a memory allowance setting in PHP on the server that needs to be increased. In some cases, it’s just a matter of editing a line in one of the site files. I tried it but it didn’t do anything. I needed to have it changed at the server, which meant a call to tech support at the host. I wasn’t sure yet if I wanted to do that, so I left the site running with a different theme and most plugins disabled while I thought it over.

Well, the next time I checked, everything worked fine. Did the change in the setting automagically work after some time? Did the tech guys at my host get swamped by calls about this from everyone who runs WordPress and change it globally? Did someone read a server log and notice my plight? I don’t know. All I know is things started working again and I’m glad.

I put the normal theme back and enabled all the plugins and everything is working fine.

It seems to have worked, and I got through it without much trouble. I use a plugin, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, which does most of the heavy lifting for me, so it didn’t take long.

Ther plugin used to work really well, but the last time I used it, there were a few glitches with the database backup. That uses another plugin. I found out that by disabling all other plugins and changing to a default theme first, it all works and the upgrade proceeds smoothly.

The problem is, they do disable all the plugins during the upgrade process, they just do it automatically at a later point. If they would just move it up sooner, it would work without my intervention. They also put the site into a maintenance mode, which probably accomplishes what using a default theme does too.

But that’s all minor. The main thing the update seems to do is change the Admin interface, the part of the site nobody else sees except the privileged few. The screen shot shows part of the new Dashboard. They did clean it up and organize it really well. I like it, but there isn’t much for the user to see.

There has been a definite surge in traffic here since the 23rd of October, which you can see in the chart. I almost never check this and I don’t have a page counter on this site. They’re tacky and unreliable anyway. Most of the time, I don’t care if I have 3 or 3,000,000 viewers. But this is interesting.

This chart is Unique Visits, in other words individual people, no matter how many pages they read. We hit a peak of 1,930 raw views on the 28th. Wow!

Another interesting statistic is what people are using to look at the web page. This chart is for the past year. Internet Explorer is still the top browser, with Mozilla (Firefox, Seamonkey) the next most popular. Netscape, Safari and Opera are distinctly in the minority.

But the biggest platforms, right up with IE, are the webcrawlers. Most people don’t think about it, but all those search engines are out there visiting web pages and gathering information about them. Mine is no exception and the custom software used for that shows up here.

Another interesting stat, although I didn’t copy the chart, was Referrers. This tells me where people are coming from. Needless to say, search engines are a big source of traffic. Google and Ask.com were big statistically. Other blogs and forums were also a significant source. Several names of sites I know link here were prominent.

No point, just that inquiring minds want to know…