mattshepherd

After reading that w3schools set of pages, it seems like this is the best option:

body {
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
	background: #FFF url('images/applemirror.gif');
	background-repeat: repeat-y;
	background-position: center;
	font-size: 80%;
	font-family: "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans Unicode", Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
	color: #000;
	text-align: center;

with “applemirror” being a 1200px-wide image, 800px in the middle for the blog and 200px for the border on the left and right. I left the middle 800px transparent, but could have just as easily made it solid, as it’s “covered” by the blog contents.

A 1200px GIF where the middle 800px is covered seems a little inefficient, but was the best workaround I could bungle my way into. Are there any more streamlined solutions?

Got frustrated, deleted everything, started from scratch, and now it all works. Hm.

Thanks! That was enough for me to puzzle it out. The Codex really turned me around and around on this one.

Aha! Thanks, oeconomist!

I still can’t figure out how to use “my” URI (instead of foo.openID.com) as the name, but that’s hopefully solveable.

And it’s nice to see some people still use the gramatically correct apostrophe before ‘blog.

I’m a bit of a dolt, but I can’t figure out how to make the “bloginfo” parameter work with specific css files, because “bloginfo” just looks for what WordPress has designated as the CSS file (style.css in my case). But I’m probably not understanding something.

Thanks for the link to the plugin, but I opted to use “in_category” elseif commands for the category-specific posts, because the plugin would have required me to make category-x.php templates for each category (right?). Extending the if-else just seemed easier. It doesn’t appear to drag too much.

(it occurs to me that this may fall under the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” category, but I can’t help but feel that a PHP command would be cleaner than that repetitive HTML. But does it make any PRACTICAL difference?)

I’ll do that! Thanks for the tip!

I’m not sure what you mean by definition, but here’s the bulk of the style.css. It’s the “visited” that seems to be the problem: I set the sitebar to a unique shade of grey so it would be easy to tell from the brown I want. When I click on any link and reload the main page, all visited links are turning up that weird grey instead of the brown that I THINK I’ve defined further up in the a:visited section.

body, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, blockquote, p{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

body{
margin: 0;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
text-align: center;
vertical-align: top;
background: #ffffff;
color: #000000;
}

h1{
font-family: Georgia, Sans-serif;
font-size: 24px;
padding: 0 0 10px 0;
}

img{
border-style: hidden;
}

a:link, a:visited{
text-decoration: none;
color: #5A3D1B;
}

a:hover{
text-decoration: underline;
}

p{
padding: 10px 0 0 0;
}

#wrapper{
margin: 0 auto 0 auto;
width: 750px;
text-align: left;
}

#header{
float: left;
width: 750px;
height: 170px;
background: url(“http://venerable-bede.com/images/bedeheader.jpg”)
no-repeat top center;
}

#headerimg {
height: 140px;
width: 740px;
}

#header a:link, a:visited, a:active{
text-decoration: none;
color: #5A3D1B;
}

#header a:hover{
text-decoration: underline;
}

#header p{
font-family: Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino, serif;
font-size: 18px;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
position: absolute; top: 130px;
letter-spacing: 2px;
color: #5A3D1B;
}

#container{
float: left;
width: 580px;
}

.post{
padding: 10px 0 10px 0;
}

.post h2{
font-family: Georgia, Sans-serif;
font-size: 18px;
}

.entry{
line-height: 18px;
}

p.postmetadata{
border-top: 1px solid #ccc;
margin: 10px 0 0 0;
padding: 0 0 0 2px;
}

.sidebar{
float: left;
width: 160px;
background: #5A3D1B;
margin: 0 0 0 10px;
display: inline;
color: #FFC468;
}

.sidebar a:link, a:visited{
text-decoration: underline;
color: #555555;
}

.sidebar a:hover{
color: #FFF3A4
}

.sidebar ul{
list-style-type: none;
margin: 0;
padding: 0 10px 0 10px;
}

.sidebar ul li{
padding: 10px 0 10px 0;
}

.sidebar ul li h2{
font-family: Georgia, Sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;
color: #FFC468;
}

.sidebar ul ul li{
padding: 0;
line-height: 18px;

Thanks for the prompt reply, iridiax.

If I understand correctly, you’re recommending my Option One, yes?

Is there any concern for page load times if you have lots of elseif commands running through eight options in your template files?