I finally got the left-hand sidebar effect I wanted, using CSS. I had to make a background image and set it to repeat-y. A hack, I know, but it works. Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that I wouldn’t ever have to use hacks with CSS. I guess I forgot my experience with HTML.

Still sick, by the way. I feel well enough to walk around and read and work on stuff like this site, but I still don’t have much physical strength (beyond mere walking), and the cough’s still here (although it feels like it’s fading away). So, life is quite tolerable now, although I still can’t wait till I’m fully recovered.

I put together a first draft (so to speak) of the Project Gutenberg programmer’s site. It went pretty well, although I’m not completely satisfied. Now the main thing is to find all the projects related to e-texts and get them into listings.

I started reading through the Vim user manuals. Lots of cool stuff I was unaware of. Digraphs are simply awesome. Much easier than copying and pasting foreign characters, which was what I was doing. Ctrl-V and Ctrl-K are my friends. (Ctrl-V lets you enter the numeric code for a character; Ctrl-K lets you enter a digraph.) The backspace method of entering digraphs is cool as well, but I think it would mess me up, so I’m sticking with Ctrl-K. Now I need to learn how to split the window so I can edit more than one file in the same window… Vim is exceedingly cool.