altering Blogger's CSS+XHTML

In the past few months I can say that I've learned a ton about programming XHTML, CSS, and utilizing them w/in strict standards. What I've also learned, is that not everyone is on the same page; or at least they aren't learning the same style. For my own use I separate everything when I'm building a style sheet; I try not to jam multiple properties values under one property. It doesn't make sense to me just yet, so I "spell it out".

Which brings me to my re-working of this blog. Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign knows CSS better than I do. That's why I'm trying to re-work his style, and not my own. Problem is half of the rules he's used have multiple values, and I've yet to figure them out. At this moment, I don't really want to either; I still need to learn things at my own pace. I just Googled

margin:1.5em 0 .75em;

to see what would come up, and a ton of references to Doug's Minima template came up. I'm not sure what that means, but it's pretty strange that it came up on the first page. I also found a template overhaul tutorial done by taoski over at GeekLimit. Nice of him to publish a Blogger tutorial on Wordpress! I honestly can't wait to get off of Blogger, but I still don't have the money to shell out for the Movable Type software.

I think my alterations look fine for the moment, and the background columns line up w/ my new portfolio site's homepage. Not bad so far.

[edit: was just cruising through 9rules and found this post by Jonathan Snook at Snook.ca where in his CSS tips he talks about shorthand for margins. I had a feeling that's what it was, but like I said, I need to learn the long version first. Thanks Jonathan!]

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