Can I change the "by" line?

Yes but we would need a link to your site or theme to be able to tell you how. But if I was to guess you would edit it on single.php

You would have to edit it manually on each post? I haven’t put up the site yet I’m just in the formatting stage trying to feel out how I want it to look.

Is there not a way to change it globally so I won’t have to do it each time?

Site url?

There’s a property named, display in CSS that can hide certain paged elements. This can apply to each element that you specify, so you won’t have to do it each time.

You have to edit all theme files that displays it. E.g. single.php, blog.php, category.php etc…

Um – not if it’s a child-friendly theme. You should be creating a child theme first.

I’d also like to get rid of the “0 comments” at the bottom since I have comments turned off. Surely there’s a way to globally get rid of this in the options, right?

Just saw your post Andrew. Thank you! I’ll read that link. Where do I put that CSS?

Try putting it in an area allocated by a Custom CSS Manager plugin.

Okay I installed that plugin. When I click “settings” I get a blank window. Is that where I put it or is there a place I can use the plug-in to modify the code that is already there? If I have to put the code from scratch I have no idea what to write. :-/

Sorry to be such a pain! I wish I knew more about web code!

Once you start modifying code, you’re likely to lose your changes once the theme updates. To view the current CSS easily, try using a Browser Inspector tool. This type of tool should allow you to find which styles are applying to which elements, within a webpage.

I use firefox, is there something similar for that?

firebug addon for firefox

Okay, the class is “byline” in the code (I just used view source). So in the plugin I wrote
p.byline
{
display:none;
}

Is that right?

It’s difficult to judge that as we don’t have access to your code or website.