The self serving post title, although accurate, is not about celebrating another year of my existence (although, that happens today too). It's more because I figured out what the heck was wrong with the template, after two days of fiddling, faddling, twiddling and anything else you can think of, I finally got it to display properly in Internet Explorer (links and all!), and I'm really, really pleased about that.
To those who are considering customizing their templates (like Michelle), fair warning: HTML has nothing to do with it. It's all Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and fairly complicated ones at that. I have almost no experience with them myself, which is why I had to bust my butt to figure this sucker out (and I did learn a lot in the process). I'd suggest you do what I did, and create a hidden "template testing" blog. (and make sure you back up any and all templates, just copy and paste the code into notepad and save it)
Even despite my precautions, I still messed up the template (which is why, if you stopped by last night, you saw I had the old template up temporarily).
This template is a heavily modified version (both in code and graphics) of the Blogger template "Rounders" by Douglas Bowman (whom I am very greatful to, just for creating it that I could learn from it).
I've now taken it upon myself to continue to learn CSS, so I can totally create my own templates from scratch. Obviously this will help me in other areas (like my own online portfolio). Once I get this more down pat, I'll also understand more how to insert the blogger coding (again, html is useless for it, for the most part).
The only real discrepancy now, is font size. I don't know if it's just my default browser settings, or what. In IE, text size is set to "medium" and everything fits perfectly, and looks nice. In Firefox however, the text is quite small, and the "normal" text size doesn't actually change it (I have to increase the size to get it comparable to IE). So either the "x-small" setting (in the CSS code), is x-small for Firefox, and "small" for IE (at least in proportional appearance), or there's a setting in Firefox I can't seem to find...
Let me know if it's too difficult to see. I can still set it to "small", and it will be normalized in FF, but a little larger in IE (but hopefully shouldn't mess up the layout of the page).
As for the links, I'm not 100% certain on how they were affected, but they show now too, so I'm glad of that :)
If anyone else is new to this, and wants to customize their blog template, maybe we can start a club, or a group blog to hash out information :)
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