:No problem, I'm happy to help.  The codes used in the signatures are almost always HTML (or sometimes CSS), which is the language web-browsers read.  There are a large number of online sources for tutorials and such, but I suspect the easiest way to make a new signature is look for someone else's signature looks and copy their code (with suitable modification).  Code should be visible if you click "edit this page" on a page with someone's signature.  As far as the length, unfortunately, there is no good way to make the signature code shorter (without, say, removing a link to either your user or talk page).  Templates, which are used elsewhere on Wikipedia for this purpose, are not allowed for signatures since it is a strain on the servers (and really slows down talk page load times, if there are a lot of signatures on a page).  I'd be happy to help with making a signature look a certain way if you have something particular in mind.