I have been playing with the theme and have a couple of suggestions. I tried using the contact form on your blog but it seems your database died when I sent it. So, repeated here is the comment:

I have downloaded and played with the theme now and I have a couple of suggestions which you can entirely feel free to ignore!

1. You can have more than one sidebar to present different information dependent on the view. This means that for the index.php you don’t need to build the sidebar manually and can let the widgets do that. You can then define a separate sidebar for things like single.php to show the post/page information (a great idea by the way, saves clutter on the post. Might even implement that on my blog!

2. While many people like a single post view, many more prefer a multi post. WP has an option to limit the number of posts on display so I would let the software do that and open the theme up to multiple posts on the first page.

3. When you get the widgets working there are a standard set available. These include the recent posts widget and a basic text widget. These will negate the need for the hard coding of either into the theme and will allow more flexibility.

I hope some of this helps. Please let me know if I can be of any assistance. I have the current (0.3) theme on my local server so can’t show you a live version of any changes I might make.

All the best

Collin

Please give me a shout when you get time and we can discuss this by email if you want a hand. :)