List of posts from specific category by month & with count?

Okay deeve,
Let’s first take a look at the link you’ve constructed here:
http://pastebin.com/RTtmBM5U

I’ve cleaned it up a little here:
http://pastebin.com/LTXHFW5S

Now, why were you putting ‘2956’ at the beginning of your link? After you create a new Page in your WordPress it give you a slug under the title. That slug should be what your link starts with.

Example:
If I create a new Page in my WordPress Page section called “Category by Month Archive”, assign it the tmpl-archive-cat-month.php as its template, and publish it – it gives me a slug of “http://MY-DOMAIN.com/category-by-month-archive/”. That is what you would start you link with:

bloginfo( 'url' ) gives your site’s domain WITHOUT the trailing slash, and after that you can enter the slug (look in my link and you’ll see my placeholder.

How’s this make sense?

Finally, cleaned up and left you some notes in the first link you sent this evening (http://pastebin.com/vX9hjy44) right over here:
http://pastebin.com/dDRQQyEF

Hopefully I closed all those <div>s correctly, and didn’t totally fuck it up 😛

Well test going to the page you set up from the WordPress admin. There’s a button that says “View Page” and it will send you to that page (just without any of the parameters it needs to spit out posts). Does that work? Or do you get a “page does not exist” message?

If it works, try adding some testing echo lines in a few places like echo 'this is the category archive page!'; but put it near the top of the template code (outside any while or if statements. Refresh the page. It should still not give you any posts but those echo lines should appear. Whether it does or not will tell us if this URL is using the template you want it to or not.

Once you have it printing the test lines, try adding a query string into the end of the URL. Something you know will give you posts, like ‘?month=5&year=2011&cat=7’. And see if you get posts. It could be that you misstyped the URL.