Ok,
so the first try was a complete bust (ugh). But I think I have 95% working solution now that’s been up since Monday night. I had to go after a completely different solution for the 3 column problem but I found it here, thanks to Paul O’brien in the UK.

Other than Avinash’s comment about this being a standard blogger design (modified to the 3 column format) - I think I’ve got most of the issues worked out. At least, the traffic hasn’t dropped to zero and I haven’t received a ton of hate-mail.

If anyone has any idea about why the most recently published post on the home page is freaking out and listing multiple copies of ghost links that aren’t actually there, I’d appreciate some help. If you check the post links on the individual post page, they look fine.