Thanks to a reader (thanks Darlene!) I now know that all my work yesterday on the left sidebar was for naught.

What I did: for each page on my old site I set up a new page here, but I didn’t publish it. Instead, I saved it as a draft. After doing that for a multitude of pages, I went into “Presentation”, clicked on widgets, and added a lot of “Text” widgets. Each widget was then labeled (What’s the Buzz?, Teaching, Timely Material, Reference, Double Reed Sources). For the text in those widgets I put in links to the pages I had done (remember, those are all in draft form, so they didn’t get published in the left sidebar as they would have had I put the “Pages” widget in the left sidebar), and in some cases I even had sub-categories so there were links to links, if you understand all this stuff.

What a drag. It worked for ME … but that’s because, silly me, I was looking at the pages in my admin role. Once I logged out, lo and behold, I, too, ran into blank pages.

So I’m bummed.

How the heck can I get all those pages up, but in the order in which I want them, rather than in an alphebetical, nonsensical way? (For instance, the “about” page — called “What’s the Buzz?” would be toward the bottom of the sidebar, which doesn’t make sense.) And I want my “subject headers” as they appear here (for the moment; by the time readers get here those might be gone as it’s rather pointless to have all this up when it doesn’t work!).

It’s really the same problem I’m encountering on the right sidebar, where I want the blogrolls in a different order, only worse.

Help?!

(Roger … you out there? I know you said you could walk me through some of this. I don’t want to bug you, but if you have a moment you could just email me and fill me in on some of this if it’s easy enough to explain. I will, though, go back to the support area and see what I can do!)