My blog is basically functional now. Yipee!
In the process of ironing out my theme for this blog, I’ve learned a few things about CSS and browser compatability (and a little about apache mod_rewrite — but I won’t go into that now 
). The most interesting thing I learned about CSS has to deal with the way IE renders styles. Now keep in mind, this is just what worked for me…I have no sources to back this up really. 
Twice I was rendering styles that Firefox would do just fine and IE would balk on. Once with a li tag and the second time with a div tag. My problem was that IE was adding a blank line below each li, which looked terrible. The div problem was that the div wasn’t being drawn large enough to fully contain a child image — there was a border so this was quite obvious. Both of these problems were surprisingly fixed by the same thing — simply setting an explicit width in the style for these objects. Evidently IE has problems figuring out the width on it’s own from container objects.
The next time I have a problem with CSS and IE, I guess I’ll make sure I have a width set first!