Coding woes

PHP confuses me.

I’m looking through other people’s code trying to simultaneously teach myself some php and hack together a third column for my already Millenium Falcon—style wordpress theme. The problem is that I keep seeing calls for functions that I can’t for the life of me find.

Take the extra space between the ad banner and the first post, for example. There aren’t any line breaks there; I call the ad code, then I call the “check for posts” code, the only problem being that I can’t seem to find the post-checking code.

I’m slowly convincing myself that all these ruitines are in fact built in to WordPress itself, and modyfing them would be compiling my own version of WP or something silly like that. I hope that’s not the case, though, because those damn spaces are annoying me.