P.Pole's [Custom] Template

I'm quite proud of my template for this blog that I've slowly created and altered over the years. It started out as a generic, one-size-fits-all kind of template that most blogs run on but I didn't want my page to look exactly like all the others. Okay, to say that it's completely groundbreaking in its layout is a huge exaggeration, but for someone without any actual knowledge of how to code (apart from some very primordial HTML), I think I've done quite nicely for myself. I mean, I had to pretty much move, shape, shift, and shapeshift by trial and error. Here's how I "coded" the stuff on this page (which, by the way, looks proper only on Firefox so far, by my testing, because of my "coding"):

1. I imagine something cool I want to achieve and catalog it away for a rainy day.
2. I take note when I see something I cataloged on another site I happen upon.
3. I press Ctrl + U (read: "View source").
4. I sift through to the good part and see if it's something done without javascript (which I don't know how to use).
5. If it's javascript, I sigh and move on. Otherwise, I move on to step six.
   
6. I go to Google.ca and look up something along the lines of "HTML (or CSS) [tag] tutorial" where [tag] is whatever the hell tag or function or whatchamacallit I saw the other page using.
7. I then read through and try to understand how the tag and its parameters work.
8. This is the fun step: I spend hours and hours typing in stuff mostly haphazardly, clicking "Preview", and then going back to make the appropriate (i.e. guess and check) corrections.
9. When this is all done I marvel at what I've created for a few moments before I check its rendering in Internet Explorer (explosion) and then in Opera (assplosion).

If I had any idea whatsoever how to code this all properly without relying so much on guess and check, I'd be able to make changes so that my page would render decently across all forms of web browsers. Sadly, I do not have the patience to sit down and really learn this stuff as it bores me. And anyway, I think I sort of enjoy my current way of doing things too much to give it up. Firefox tricked me into thinking it kept web standards before, but now I know that the developers took a few liberties with it (or so I've heard from watching videos of conferences with web standard discussions). Apparently they decided that some rules were better kept and others bent/broken. I don't know what that means in detail but hey, I don't think I'll need to know all that to be able to enjoy my Webernets.
Nevertheless, I thought maybe since my current template is running a bit cluttered I would consider upgrading my template to Blogger's new way of handling templates that much resembles Xanga's styling pages. This would mean pretty much wiping my entire template settings (even though I simply love my fly-out/mouse-over menu things). And so, I decided to check out Blogger's version of the template designer on my other "blog" (which is just there to reserve the domain and for testing such as this). I wanted to see if I could make it work towards my needs, whether it was worth the switch, and whether there might be a chance of my reworking my menus (again, my favourite part of this template) to work there. So far, no luck. I mean, it's convenient to have them do kind of what I've done with the hierarchy look that now comes default but it's not a mouse-over fly-out.
It's got auto-adding and -sorting of new stuff (like links, archive links, etc...) whereas I update my template every month with the new links myself (every month I add a new list item linking to the new month's posts). Still, I'm not convinced. It looks as if the new template designer thing is great for adding page elements and quickly editing them but it doesn't do much in terms of allowing me to really tweak stuff with the HTML/CSS editor and that's what I need to be able to do above all else. It's either that or I just don't know enough to be good at manipulating (the right bits of) code. Sigh.
Anyway, I'm going to stick with my current state of affairs until I really find a reason to switch over and get rid of/recreate my mouse-over menus. I love that thing. Mouse... over! Mouse... over! Wee!