I just made another change – hopefully it will make the blog a bit more viewable on the netbook, and hopefully address the issue that Roberto mentioned with his 4:3 screen.

Thank you for the feedback. I am not 100% happy with the new layout yet.

I admit that the code sections in the original layout caused me problems in the past. It was especially difficult to copy the text from a code section if the last line did not quite fit into the small code window – it seems that 50% of the time Internet Explorer would also copy the entire contents of the web page from that point down. I also did not like that nearly half of an execution plan was hidden in the code sections. The content portion of the blog (and the code sections) is now almost twice as wide as before. This change not only fixed the code sections, but also allows me to add larger versions of pictures that are presented on the blog.

After seeing Roberto’s comment this morning I attempted to view the web page using a Toshiba netbook that has a 16:9 screen with 1024 horizontal lines of resolution. The content portion of the page would just barely fit on the screen if I scrolled the screen slightly to the right. The latest release of Internet Explorer offers a zoom percent, which I noticed automatically adjusts on some websites that are viewed on the netbook. The zoom feature may be a work-around. It would be nice if I did not need to scroll slightly to the right to view a page.

I modified this blog article to include 3 screen capture:
1. Netbook showing the “modified” version of this blog.
2. 4:3 20 inch monitor at 1600 x 1200 resolution (not using the full width of the screen) showing the original version of the blog.
3. 4:3 20 inch monitor at 1600 x 1200 resolution (not using the full width of the screen) showing the modified version of the blog.

Thank you for the suggestion. The last time that I looked at the various themes was in December 2009. The theme that I originally selected simply truncated the right side of code sections. I explored the idea of using a flexible width theme, but found that those themes also caused the right side of some code sections to be truncated. So, I settled on a theme that permits horizontally scrollable code sections. When the code section is taller than the web browser window it is difficult to see the entire code section because, of course, the scrollbar does not appear on the screen.

Now that I have a couple of decent articles on the blog (I think that I am up to 5 decent articles now), it might be worth spending $15 USD a year for access to WordPress’ Custom CSS feature so that I can hopefully make the code sections wider and still scrollable.

Great thread but the wordpress template you use makes it really hard to follow. is there a chance you move to a flexible-width template (like the one I use or Jonathan use there are around 8 templates on wordpress ) instead of fixed-width template like the one you use ?

Your stuff is really great but the template makes it very hard to follow especially when there is too many code in it.

Please take this as a regular loyal reader feedback.