Ok, a couple of major wins.

First of all, practically all of my pages are now sharing a single cascading style sheet. This means I can now make formatting changes for the whole web site in one place. Very exciting.

Secondly, I was able to figure out how to get my archive listings to show up on the main pages of each section. This makes the whole archive viewing process much more pleasant. Huzzah!

Next steps: trying to figure out how to make a version of the site suitable for printing (with an alternate style sheet), updating the photo gallery and guest book sections to share the same style sheet, and working out how to make sure the site degrades gracefully for users of Netscape, Lynx, Opera, and any other browsers.

I'm gradually going to start moving all of my site's formatting into a cascading style sheet. I hope.

As a first step, I made sure the main page was valid 4.01 transitional html and had properly formed css code. Looks good so far.

Now I'm beefing up the style sheet on the main page and gradually trying to strip out formatting code within the body. Useful references are the W3C's HTML 4.01 specification and their CSS2 specification. Also, WebMonkey's HTML cheatsheet. I've also created a temporary version of my homepage locally on my hard drive, but you won't be able to follow this link.