Change and move around a post's meta stuff

Hi there.

I’m a teacher on spring break in the throes of my 2.3 to 3.1 upgrade of my personal blog. I’ve done a lot with my twentyten child theme, but I’m stumped on how to get back the way I like to have my posts formatted.

I’m trying to recreate my old look, which was set up with a left-aligned date and right-aligned category over a dotted border preceding the post title.

Back in the day (2008), everything but the formatting for this was set up in my index.php as seen below. So I’m wondering, can this code be modified and placed in the loop.php? (I have a feeling my lack of knowledge is transparent in the question.)

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">

<p class="alignleft"><small><?php the_time('l, j F Y') ?> <?php the_time('g:ia'); ?></small> </p><p class="alignright"><i><?php the_category(', ') ?></i></p>
<div style="clear: both;"></div>
				<h2><a>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h2>

[Please post code snippets between backticks or use the code button.]

Thanks in advance—I’ve been astounded and encouraged by the courteous and helpful replies I’ve gotten this week.