…I finally got my “About” page looking halfway presentable. See here for the less-than-inspiring result.
It’s not much of a triumph–ultimately, I have to jettison both the “sidebar” div and the “aside” div; I could get neither to format properly. In the end, I found that the image I wanted to use is roughly the same size as the text in what was supposed to be a sidebar, so I just did it all as a straightforward paragraph-wrapped-around-image.
The result looks roughly the way I wanted, but I’m disappointed that I couldn’t get the formatting behind the scenes the way I hoped. Also, I see some tweaks I could use but I need to move on; at least I have something readable up. Now I can give images and Photoshop my full attention.
I’ve commented on Sara’s blog today.
Kirk Johnson's Digital History Blog 
The about page looks great! I laughed out loud at the photo caption.
Your post gives me motivation..I’m still hard at work making things actually work on my websites. I’m much happier playing in photoshop than Dreamweaver, but glad we’re all moving forward on this stuff. Good work!
The page and project 1 page look good. Are you using 960gs? If I might suggest a little bit of spacing adjustment around the subheadings, as well as moving the nav bar down a little. All in all, a great trajectory for your pages. The project 1 page looks fantastic!
Thanks for the comments–Martin, I am not using 960 (yet) but your suggested changes are good ones.