I've been playing with the CSS for a while now and I think I've got it down. Here's something I did that made my life for layout a whole lot easier:
This does a couple of things. Setting the widths makes sure there is an extra 2% of the browser canvas available for "wiggle room." Making both layers float left allows the links be longer than the content without expanding to the entire browser width at the bottom. Also, if there isn't enough room to have both side by side the links layer wraps to the bottom and both are left justified.
I'll be making more adjustments to my blog over the next couple of days for certain.
This is my first post using MovableType. I wasn't really sure that I would like it at first, but I decided I had better try it since most of the people that whose blogs I read use it too. I started out writing my own which I quickly gave up on since I would have literally wasted the entire summer away hacking away at it. I almost used BBlog which was very easy to set up and really nice, but just isn't mature enough for me. I decided that I could live without threadded comments, which was the final factor in making the move with MT.
To begin with, I installed a copy on my computer at home to play with things like the stylesheet and learn how to configure a blog. Then I copied everything over to the web server. Funny thing is on my home computer I could get BerkeleyDB to work, but didn't have the MySQL Perl module. The server had no BerkeleyDB, but MySQL works fine.