sharky44

To anyone attempting to use the code above:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 1);

Note that the timout is set to 1 second. I was getting blank responses on any files over a few kB. Set it to something more reasonable, especially if you want to upload images of larger size.

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);

If you just want to get rid of them, go into your dashboard, click the design tab, then widgets. The things on the right side are all of the things on the sidebar. You can remove each one. For most themes, however, the left column will not expand to fill that space; it will be empty. If you want your blog posts and such to fill that space, you’ll have to follow viiadesign’s advice. See the docs–there are good tutorials covering all that stuff.