OK, now I’m having a bit of fun… You may have noticed this page looks different than it did before. I’ve started looking more into what are called ‘stylesheets.’

Stylesheets are a way to format web pages so that certain things always appear in a certain way, to give the page, and the site, a more standardized look. Stylesheets are different files from the web pages themselves.

For example, you might create a stylesheet, and inside it you define a category to be “articleheader”; you can give that definition certain formatting, including text size, color and style; background color, border, underlines, link colors, margins, indents, etc. Then, when you make a web page and you want all of those styles to apply to something you’ve just typed, all you have to do is refer to “articleheader” and the stylesheet is referenced for the formatting information.

Movable Type, which is the software that controls this blog, has a standard style sheet, which you can then play with, changing all sorts of attributes. So I made wider side margins, colored the backgrounds, shrunk and centered the calendar, indented the entry text, changed the links’ hover-color, so on and so on.

If you’re interested in looking at a style sheet tutorial, visit WebMonkey’s guide. It’s always fun to figure out yet another layer of doing stuff on the web.