Ahh...I see

When I finally realized that I did not have to do the xml myself and it was just a matter of creating the widgets in the window made for widget creation then things got a lot faster. All the stuff I wanted to keep is on now. Comments are proving tricky as the haloscan widget program wiped out everything on the blog. Will try again when I hear back from the haloscan people.
Over the coming weeks I will tune and modify things. Some of the color schemes look a bit dodgy. Need to organise the links better and the tracker is not working.