No .ht file to be found. Can’t change permissions.

Okay. I may be getting somewhere on the sidebar and the comments. I thank you for that. Still can’t get photos up though.

I do know the difference between a folder and a file. I read but so much of it is just greek to me. Plus postings are showing up apparently while I’m typing, so I don’t know something has been said until after I’ve sent the post. Though I do appreciate the speed of your responses, really.

As Yosemite said, your problem is that you want to solve ALL your issues at once and right now.
Go step by step.
Make the basic blog blog functional. No plugins in the first 5 minutes ??
Deal with the image upload; thousands of users managed to do it…
Then take the next one: sidebar > editing theme files.
etc, etc.

And ask ONE issue in a topic. Better chances to get focused , useful answers. Less chances for you to get frustrated.

Believe it from a linguist who just blogs (and is not even a native English speaker, LOL).

Believe me I’ve been frustrated all weekend. Pulling my hair out. I’ve been working on this thing – all day yesterday, was up till 5am. Worked on it straight since 12:30 today and now it’s after midnight. Back to work tomorrow, and the other site is down, gone, it was decimated with the import. It would be nice if it were functional but it’s funky, there are a lot more issues and I’m just trying to get it up *right* because I have a 70-hr workweek ahead of me and won’t be able to tackle this again for another couple of weeks. It shouldn’t take this long.

I’d be happy to deal with the image upload if I knew WHY it doesn’t work. I still don’t.

About creating the directory, on the photo upload, I wasn’t trying to create a directory. That’s just part of the error message where you try to upload a photo on the page where you write your post. I click on “upload”, choose my photo, then click on “upload” and that’s what I get. Consistently. Still getting it. The settings in Misc. were set like you said, yesterday. I double-checked them. It’s just not working. Is it just bug-gy or something? I’m doing nothing differently than I did the one time I actually could get a photo in there (through the quicktags, because I try it both ways – I’ll pick a photo that I have on the server and then one that I don’t to upload that way….It just doesn’t work. And I have a whole section of photos that needs to go back up. I just don’t know. Is typepad any better?

For the upload feature to work properly – you need to make ‘writable’ the WP-CONTENT directory [=chmod 777] (it has beeen told several times!) and WP will create the rest of the sub/sub/directories under it… provided it can write into the “parent” directory. The parent is “wp-content”. “Writable” in this case means that the script itself (WP) can do the job: writing to it an creating subfolders.
(Just scroll up and read my earlier reply about the parent)

I know it’s challenging to learn in one single day the basics of webmastering, the use of a brand new tool and trying to use one of the most challenging features of this tool = the import. That’s too much, I agree.