Doh!

After a few moment of darkness, the light bulb came on

When you add an image field to a content type, you get to specify a directory. The directory you create is here: sites default files [directory-you-created], and any image you upload when you create a story from then on gets placed there

Default for content types is PROMOTE TO FRONT PAGE. To turn this off, go to ADMINISTER, CONTENT TYPES, EDIT, WORKFLOW SETTINGS. (Defaults are there for each content type.)

Frontpage "heads" (part of content, titles are not displayed) jump around for some reason. Need to figure this our but, for now, extra right margin on preceding image makes text behave.

If style changes don't seem to "take", make sure that the INPUT TYPE is set to FULL HTML, not FILTERED.

On the EDIT PANEL page, it seems like there's an extra step. UPDATE and then you still have to SAVE.

Census reports from database seemed fine. But then I logged out to see what an unauthenticated (normal) web viewer would see, and the data disappeared from most but not all of the columns. Panic. Then I realized that you have to give assign PERMISSIONS to fields. The default is "unauthenticated cannot view".

snippet: lessthan img style="float: left; margin: 0 40px 10px 0;" src="http://370rsd.com/drupal/sites/default/files/frontpage/census.jpg" alt="" /greaterthan

snippet: lessthan p style="margin-right: 30px;" greaterthan

some module directory names are still "olde-style"... but when I try to fix them, I can't update php (I get a blank screen or a fatal error...