When I first started experimenting with the web in 1995, we had notepad. And perl. I took it upon myself to learn a bit of each. Three years later, when the web started really taking off, I found I had better things to do than keep track of the moster table nests you had to use in those days to make a page work, and full-blown CMSs weren’t really viable, so you tended to update an entire site manually.

What a pain in the ass.

All of you who are dealing with templates for CMSs and CSS for the first are so friggin lucky. Really. You have no idea.

If I were to offer one piece of advice, it would be this: Get a good text editor. I have a Mac, and I use TextMate ... it does ‘folding’, syntax highlighting for both CSS and HTML, and has some neat auto-complete features to help automate the tedious bits.