A challenge for the experts! Editing blog post layout on homepage

Hello,

My url is https://www.sapnamagazine.com.

I’m pretty inexperienced with .php but I spliced together some stuff to edit my default.php, and came up with a format that does the following:

– in the top area, display the most recent post from 3 different categories
– in the bottom area, display the most recent posts from the blog category.

What I want to do:

– change the top area (3 boxes underneath the slideshow) to display the 3 most recent posts, no matter what category they’re from (even if they’re from the same category).

– in those top 3 boxes, I’d like to exclude two categories, numbers 9 and 168.

For that top area, when we release new boxes under the slideshow, I go into default.php and edit the line that says

$cats = array(7,159,3);

Where 7, 159 and 3 would be the three categories in the boxes. I know I have to change this line but don’t know what to do…

The entire code for my default.php (which specifies my blog layout on the homepage) is below.

Thank you so much in advance!
Mar

[Mod Note: Chunk of code removed. If you want to post large blocks of code, please use a pastebin.]