How to widgetize my sidebar?

Ok, let’s try this again…here is my sidebar.php:

http://wordpress.pastebin.com/24AqF8s0

I was making this waaaay to hard! It finally hit me to simply cut out anything in my sidebar, making sidebar.php simply an opening and closing div basically, adding the appropriate before/after comments in functions.php, and then pasting the items that were previously on my hard coded sidebar (custom side navigation menu and a scrolling iframe element) into custom text widgets. Easy peasy and took a whopping 5 minutes once it dawned on me…!

Thanks for the nudges in the right direction!!