I had committed myself to not doing this again anytime soon, but when I started an IM session with Radovan about CSS design for MT, I just couldn't resist tweaking my own templates and stylesheets a bit - and once again, wasted a few precious hours of my life with this stupid CSS stuff.

I'm pretty happy with the result (which you can see now); the only thing that bothers me is that it's completely out of proportion to the amount of work it took. For me, CSS is hard, and I don't really think that this is my fault exclusively. After all, I'm a programmer - using a language like that shouldn't be hard if you can program in Perl or C++ or Java - or should it? Do web designers intuitively grasp box models, the float concept, relative and absolute positioning?

One problem remains: I have all of the content nested inside a <div id="container"> - this is used because the body itself has the grey background, and the container has a white background and a border. The blog entries float to the left so that the menu becomes visible on the right. But why the heck is the border and white background not rectangular? Scroll down to see what I mean.

And a bit of final advice to novices: Don't rewrite the MT default templates and stylesheets from scratch - try to stick with them and modify them in small increments. Unless you're a) absolutely sure you know that you're doing or b) don't mind spending time on Friday nights fixing your stupid blog layout.