cleaning

cleaning up the layout a little bit. no more yucky slowdown in IE: i figured out that IE doesn’t like to repeat a background image, at least one with transparency, too many times; so instead of using the smallest possible denominator of pixels to show a grid, i simply repeated the pattern within the image itself a few times. in this case, i changed the grid to vertical lines; but where i might have liked to use, say, 2×1 pixels to repeat across the element, i used something like 2×75 to reduce the overall repeats. not sure why this strange behavior isn’t better known or more widely documented, but i may have to experiment with it more in the future.

also fixed a couple of positioning errors on my part. the sidebar isn’t the most consistent, because some of my sections there have heading elements within list tags, while others don’t, possibly owing to different plugins having been created for different versions of WordPress, or for different themes, and so on.