Craft #38 - Blog Design: Adding lists

Back when I was in middle/high school I self-taught myself some basic HTML.  I remember designing a webpage at one point in time. And that was before cascading style sheets were popular, so it must have been a lot of work.  However, when I was in college, I tried to edit a blog design.  It was terrible.  I did some of the things I wanted to do, but never could get my spacing issues settled.  And I could not figure out CSS for the life of me.  I felt pretty dumb, so I quit.  Boo hoo.


Fast forward to now.


The longer I use this blog, the more I despise my cookie-cutter blog design.  I would love to edit the design.  I'm going to start small and do various things to it throughout the months.  For "Craft" #38  I am going to figure out how to add a list to the side of my blog.  I would like one list of all my craft ideas, not necessarily with numbers.  That way I have a place to keep my ideas without knowing when exactly I'm going to do the specific crafts.  I also thought about having another list of my completed crafts, but it seems to me that my  archive already serves that purpose, and I don't want to get list-happy.  


I'll try to keep this post updated as I figure things out.  I was thinking about starting out by searching online for tutorials.  I know that's how I've done it in the past.  As I get further with the design, I might consider purchasing a book.  We'll see...  I'm excited, though.  I'm definitely going to get started on it tonight!


Attempt #1: Epic fail, lol.


I found this code:
           < ul >
      < li >Coffee< / li >
      < li >Milk< /li >
     < /ul >

So, I plugged in a few things, and hit "preview."  This was a screenshot before the edit:

and this was a screenshot after the edit:


...

 Just 20 minutes later... I've decided to do this differently.  I don't have the foggiest idea how to edit a template that someone has already written, so I'm going to start my own, I guess.  I really thought just adding a list would be simple, but I just don't get it. :(  I'm looking at HTML,CSS, and XHTML books right now...