But I don't understand blocks.
I getting errors from about like 885 of blocklib.php which says
$blocknames = explode(',', $posblocks[$i]);
I think this does the wrong thing if $posblocks[$i] is '' (for example if you have no blocks in either the left or right column). Instead I think it should be
$blocknames = $posblocks[$i] ? explode(',', $posblocks[$i]) : array();
Can someone who understands these things either confirm or deny. Thanks.
array() makes more sense to me than FALSE.
This issue is the stupid feature of explode, where if you explode an empty string, you get array(''), instead of array(), which is always what you want, so you always need an if statement.
Ah I was reading the docs too quickly (http://php.net/explode) and saw FALSE (but it was about the seprator). 
No argument about the stupidity of array('');