Spent much of the last two days with my very skilled and patient wife digging into CSS and trying to make some more themes for my school Web logs. We pretty much ended yesterday with a concept, at least, and a pretty good understanding of how CSS work and the flexibility they give. I was inspired on Wednesday when I surfed into ZenGarden and saw some really beautiful designs that would fit Web logs well. The other area where I pretty much got caught up to speed was the creation of Manila templates in a HTML editor like GoLive. Figuring out where the macros go and what ones have to be in there was a bit hairy at first, but I’m getting there. I know what we came up with isn’t especially scintillating, but I wanted to work with the school colors and be able to swap in a bunch of different graphics in the nav column. Now I just have to get really clear on what sticks when I make a theme of this and what coding I lose. I think that most of the additional code in the main template gets lost, but that the CSS and all of the other settings get saved. If anyone knows of a resource that shows what themes save, please let me know.
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