I changed the code further down in post_side and voila! it worked!
http://forums.bellaonline.com/ubbthreads.php/topics/555713/Re_Buying_Poverty#Post555713Do I really have to touch post_top? When I changed that, nothing happened ...? I had to do a fair amount of tweaking in post_side to get the footer area to look nice so I don't want to do that sort of work "blind" in post_top.