How to Learn CSS in One Day

Before today, I had only played around with CSS a bit to add rudimentary web interfaces to projects I've been hacking on. Even that usually ended up being an extra luxury; most of what I would call an "adequate" web page was done using hand-edited HTML. Hell, on days where I've felt extra retro-sadistic, I've wanted to make everything GREEN, toss in a few <pre> tags and be done with it, much like JWZ does.

But that changed this morning.

Last night, KK and I decided that running blogs off of the home server just wasn't going to cut it. Reasons for that are plenty, but it basically boils down to "dynamic web pages on a 486 on the wrong end of a DSL (is there a *right* end?) are f'n slow!" Slow site means no use means no need to learn CSS to make things look pretty. Which brings us to this site -- free, Google-owned blog hosting. Sounds good for a try.

Within a few hours of setting up account and blogs (and getting past the disappointment that all the good blog names have already been taken), the realization that all of the templates sucked (we know they suck, but *what* do they suck...) sunk in. I decided to do what I often do when confronted with such a challenge: yawn, scratch myself, and surf slashdot. Being the smarter of the two of us, Kerry did not opt for the same course of action.

A few hours later, I started getting requests from her to put some images on a server for her to use as headers, bullets and other blog elements. Shortly thereafter, questions on how to do some fairly complex things with the CSS template. Shit. Blind leading the blind. At best I've got as good of an idea how to do these things as she does. A few Google searches and quite a few lucky guesses ("Try increasing the value of that padding there. Didn't work? Oh, I must have meant *that* one!") later, her page is starting to look pretty solid.

Shit, again. Time to do something about *my* blog. Browsing through some of the blogs out there, it becomes pretty obvious that there are a lot of spam blogs, and regardless of which template I pick, my blog will look just like everyone else's unless I make some changes. A few more hours of swearing at (in?) CSS syntax later, and we have what we're looking at right now. Not too bad if I say so myself, even when compared to Kerry's.

• Tags:
• css
• blogger