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When running a blog an important thing to remember is Browser Compatibility. This is important to remember that your readers are using different operating systems and different browsers and each of these may present a different view of your blog and present different issues. What looks okay to you may not always appear the same to your readers and checking your browser compatibility should be something that all bloggers practice sense you should not single out only the browser you use. I worked with a software company for a while and know that every browser has it’s ups and downs when it comes to agreeing with your CSS/HTML/XHTML/ext. and fixing and tweaking can sometimes be a time consumption task, and most of the time it is just a litte CSS tweaking which I will not go into in this article, just how you can find these problems and then you can work from there.

The main thing is to cover most of the popular browsers and work out the bugs from there. These include but are not limited to Firefox, IE, Opera, Flock, and Safari and there latest and previous versions, and then the most common operating systems like Windows XP/ME, Vista, Linus, OS X. This can take a good bit of time to go though or present a problem if you only have access to one operating system, but most browsers are easily available for most operating systems.

The good news is there are tools available to ease this process. I have not found a free one but I have most of the browsers on my PC already so then the main thing I have to worry with is looking in to see what Mac users see and this is where these tools come in handy. Most come at a price but the majority have a free trial of some kind and if you are only doing one site then they the trials may work fine for you.

Tools to check your blogs Browser Compatibility:
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. And its Free.

Browsrcamp allows you to test the compatibility of your design with Mac OS X browsers. To check in Safari if free, and the offer a paid service for other Mac OS X browsers. They also have

Essentiabct is another browser compatibility testing service with a few other features. Has a free trial package.

Browsercam checks your browser on any operating system along with other options. They have a free trial, but the service plans start at $59,95 a month or $1985 for one day.

As you might see if you run a few test that 50% of the browsers your site looks okay and the other half looks off somewhere are another. How you deal with these issues is up to you. I tend to ignore the majority of non-popular browsers as it tends to be to much time to go though every single browser and make the according adjustments, and I try to keep up with the changing of most popular browsers and update accordingly when I have time, but again it’s a lot to keep up with. So you must decide for yourself is it worth it to meet your readers browser preferences.

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Tags: , blog, browser, compatibility