I spent an hour or two working on the templates for this site today. I don’t claim to be a professional designer, but I enjoy working on websites.

Years ago, when I first started writing HTML pages, I would get irritated with having to wait to reload the page in the browser to see how it “really” looked, but now I think I almost like the save-rebuild-view site rhythm of working in Movable Type. Then when I edit the CSS “live” with Chris Pederick’s fantastic web developer’s toolbar extension for Firefox, I feel like a magician.

Part of the appeal of building web pages is that it really feels like I’m building something. I’m not particularly good a building things out of atoms; either through impatience, incompetence, or inexperience, I tend to make a mess when working with tools.

But on the internets, no one knows you are a klutz. Web pages are made out of symbols and logic, and I tend to be much more comfortable in that world. And if I mess up, I haven’t ruined the wood or sliced off a finger. I can just edit-save-rebuild-view site again.

Even so, I can’t get the dang CSS image replacement technique to square with a clickable logo, and the list of categories doesn’t show up on the actual category archive pages, and none of the columns are actually aligned vertically, and…