The site has begun to approximate the layout I had in my head, with the content boxes encircling the center content.  If you have a smaller screen, you may have to scroll the outer window to see the whole page, but I'm hoping for the majority of visitors, the content will appear in its entirety, and you should only need to scroll the interior box to read the posts.  I may shrink the scroll box a bit so that it will fit even on a small screen (like my 12" laptop screen).

I am still somewhat baffled by the notion that DIVs and SPANs are somehow supposed to replace tables, since for the life of me, I cannot get any combination of them to layout in the simplest possible side-by-side configuration.  For instance, the group of three boxes beneath the post scroller was done with a table.  Why?  Well, you can't just use DIVs, because they break afterwards since they are block element so they stack vertically.  You can't just use SPANs, which don't break, because at least as far as I can tell, because I am using DIVs inside to represent the title and content of each box, the SPANs non-breaking aspect is ignored.  I'd switch the titles to be SPANs instead of DIVs, but SPANs don't accept a width or height attribute so all my title boxes would be different sizes which is visually unappealing (at least ot me).  I'd use DIV with style: inline, except that has the same problem.  I'd float them all to the left to get them to stack up, except then I'd need to put in some kind of placeholder DIV to bump the footer down, and the float property seems to be the thing I understand least because I guess it pulls those elements out of the static layout and adds them to their own layout so I'm even worse off when things start to go wrong.

But hey, I create a table with three cells, set the margin information, stick my two DIVs in each cell and voila, a nice, simple side-by-side layout that is easy to understand and debug.  If some HTML guru out there who really understands this stuff can explain to me how to get the effect I'm looking for here, I'd love to have a better understanding. Hours of web research have turned up very little that would work for me here.