lorennorman.com

And I finally figured out how to fix it!

UPDATE:  This set of instructions is for Version 1.0 of the plugin

In your WordPress admin panel, click “Plugins”, then click “Edit” next to the Seesmic plugin.  Now you’ll be presented with the code for the Seesmic plugin.  All you really need to do is find all instances of “clear:both;” and remove them entirely.

The problem is the way that some themes are written.  It has to do with how your sidebars are implemented, that is, if they use floats or not.  The “clear” CSS attribute causes your Seesmic videos to appear below your sidebars, which generally means it just slams a huge amount of whitespace above the first Seesmic embed on any page.

Clear out the “clear” tags, and its gone!  (make sure to clear them ALL, or some strange things will happen)

UPDATE:  This set of instructions is for Version 0.1.5 (the latest version at this date)

They’ve moved the “clear:both;” stylings into the seesmic-wp.css file in the base of your Seesmic plugin directory, and that file isn’t easily editable from within the Wordpress interface.  You still just need to find and delete them all, but the process will be dependent on how you do your FTPing and file management on your server.  Probably you’ll just want to open the file on your local machine and reupload it.

Sorry I had my facts wrong, I had no idea they had updated the plugin!

I’d still like to get some feedback from the developers, because we technically shouldn’t be going into plugin code and changing things willy-nilly like this, but this hack seems benign enough.  The official place to talk about this is the Seesmic tech support page at Get Satisfaction, and Loic himself assured me (in the comments) that they will take a look at this, so perhaps some feedback is forthcoming!

Happy video chatting, everyone!