Eye Of The Beholder

While we were visiting with Chuck’s family in Washington state, the subject of my blog came up. I had e-mailed our family and friends back in November of 2006 when I started Pink Granite. But only a handful of them made and continue to make, regular visits (bless their loyal hearts!). Early in our stay, our brother-in-law said he had tried to find Pink Granite, but wasn’t sure he was in the right place. He brought us over to their new-to-them laptop and pulled up my blog. I did not recognize it! It looked awful. The entire page was a mostly white background, with badly spaced text. My two columns were visible, but looked as if they had been typed up and mimeographed. We showed them how dramatically different PG looks on our laptop. We all concluded that the difference might have something to do with our using different internet browsers. But the fact that their “new” laptop was previously owned, caused us all to think perhaps the settings were screwed up.

I didn’t think much more about it until yesterday’s audio adventure. When I learned that DancingMorganMouse couldn’t listen to the recording of my poem, I started researching what the problem was and how to fix it. I immediately began reading about tons of problems with embedding audio clips in Blogger. Many of them referenced the significant differences between browsers. So today I did some testing.

Back in 2006, the artist in me spent a long time choosing which Blogger template to use and then I tweaked the colors and layout until they were exactly what I wanted. When I work on my blog, using my Apple laptop and Safari, it is entirely WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get). This first screen shot is what Pink Granite looks like using my Safari browser:


When I use the FireFox or Camino browsers (both part of the Mozilla family), Pink Granite looks very much the way I intended it to. But if I use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, this is what I see:


Eeeek!
And even this image is much better than what I saw on my in-law’s laptop while out in greater Seattle!

So, my question is this: What do you see when you stop by Pink Granite???
Does it look like the first screen shot or the second or something else entirely?
And which browser are you using?
Thanks in advance for your help!