Alli

It is archive.php (my mistake adding the s in my initial post) and it definitely does not have the get_sidebar() function.

I don’t think the template tame trick would work since I want the sidebar to appear only on the front landing page of the blog and not any individual pages, posts, archive pages, category pages, etc.

This is a theme I’ve been building myself based on _s.

It looks smart.
You seem to have two colour schemes going, a purple one and a blue one. I’d just stick to one or the other, ie, if you made the column on the left and your link colours purple, then the site would have a more uniform look. You could make a blue skin later, if you really can’t decide between purple and blue.

I don’t have a my-hacks.php file. Should I?

I’m sorry to post again, but this comment issue is really frustrating me. I can’t get the comments to popup, either, but I really just want them to WORK popup, or no. the site is https://entranced.org

I can’t get popup comments to actually pop up, or comment for that matter.

How do I make my category outputs not an underdered list? I’m referring to the link in the entry, not the list of categories, by the way, if that makes any difference.
I’ll worry about validation once I get everything working and looking the way I want.