So I have finally broken away from the horrible vanilla SharePoint look. I initially started trying to integrate my design into this blog quite a while ago and found it frustrating and slow. I know little to nothing about CSS so it just frustrated the hell out of me. I ended up shelving the project for a later date.
Two days ago I decided to have another go, this time using the CKS Enhanced Blog Edition Beta 1 modular framework. Being a contributer on the CKS Internet Extranet Edition this was an obvious choice for me. I was pleasantly suprised to find how easy it was to work with. The EBE guys have done an a pretty amazing job. Basically the entire Blog interface has been replaced with custom user controls that use XSL stylesheets to control the display. I love XSL and think its great way to produce clean HTML so I was quite happy with this arrangement.
If you havent checked out
CKS:EBE Beta release you should do so soon. All the provoke blogs are running off this engine.