Cascading style sheeeeeit

Hello again,

As I mentioned a few posts ago, when I decided to set up this blog on its own domain, one of my goals was to have an accompanying website where I can collect various resources relating to theoretical computer science. There is a limit to how many links you can stuff into the sidebar of a blog.

I initially was using some old html that I had left over from several years ago for the website. The overall structure was frames-based, and it used tables to provide some of the formating. (At the time when I originally wrote it, CSS was not yet in widespread use.) So I decided that before I start adding content to the site, I better rewrite it using current techniques.

I went to my local bookstore and selected a book on HTML and CSS, and began working through it. The first thing that struck me is that HTML itself is pretty much unchanged from 6 years ago. The other thing is that web design nowadays looks nothing at all like what I was familiar with. Well, I dutifully worked through the examples in the text, created a simple layout with a masthead, sidebar and main body area, and tried it out. It was utterly unreadable. I also found that making (seemingly) minor tweaks to the CSS resulted in drastic changes to the layout, with the sidebar switching sides, the contents disappearing from view, and other generally bad things happening.

Finally, I punted. I copied the CSS from my Blogger template and stripped out most of the Blogger-specific stuff, and used that. Eventually I'll learn how to properly use CSS (I've got a new, better book to read) and redo the site, but for now it's workable, and aesthetically it matches the blog.

Since I was tinkering around with the Blogger template anyway, I also went ahead and added some tweaks to that. Recent comments now appear in the sidebar, and there are trackback links (via Technorati) at the bottom of each post. Now I just have to wait for someone to link to a post so I can try it out. I promise that my next post will deal with something actually connected to theoretical computer science, so there might be some content worth linking to!