Family Life

One of the things I wanted to do over the year-end break was to learn all about CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. This is a clever scheme to manage the layout and formatting on a web page independently of the content (i.e. the actual text you’re reading).

I set this blog up last summer, not having much of a clue as to what I was doing. The blogging software was pretty easy and automatic to install. I searched around until I found a template that I liked the look of, and then dropped it into place. Also pretty automatic. The template takes care of the title at the top, all the stuff in the sidebar on the right, the posts that you see in the middle of the page, taking your comments, and so on. I didn’t have to know how it did it. I just knew that it did.

But there were things that I wanted to change. A lot of it was buried in the mysteries of CSS. So slowly, little by little, I’ve been investigating, learning, tweaking, experimenting. I managed to add the calendar block up by the title of each post. I found out how to place photos just so, and how to do so with the bare minimum of effort. It’s all really the internet equivalent of writing a “Hello World” program–I’m barely scratching the surface–but it’s satisfying to learn something new, try it out, and see it work.

Photo note: Kakabeka falls, on the Kaministiquia river.

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