I was able to figure out on my own what’s wrong with the template and corrected the errors.  I should give myself credit for being persistent because I finally was able to make this template work! So now, as you can see, I’m using this template (pic, below right).

I told you, I don’t give up that easily especially when I’ve set my eyes on something that catches my fancy. You see, the problem was with the sidebar… it won’t go to the side, instead, it stayed in the footer. I had a feeling that the solution lies on the size of the width as my pictures were bigger than what’s specified in the template codes so I asked the template author whether I should re-size the blog post width and sidebar as well as the pictures. But he didn’t agree with me; he said that “even increasing the blog post width, it's vain cos any problem in template excep you want to increase a big size” [sic].

Of course, I believed him  because, after all he was the genius who converted this template from WordPress to Blogger.  So the past two weeks I used a temporary template and studied this template (pic, right) trying to see which parts I could tweak and/or change. Last night I was already exasperated from tweaking and searching for another template and decided, as my last ditch-effort, to just try resizing the pictures and the width of the post and sidebar. I was right – it felt like I had hit the jackpot! I should’ve trusted my instincts earlier. . Anyhoo, I’m just happy that this template is working  (the banner will come later) and that I appreciate the assistance that was given to me by the template author even if he himself gave up in the end. 

Now  I could go back to regular blogging.