I think everything said made a great deal of sense. But, what about this? suppose you added a little information? I am not saying your information is not good., but what if you added a title to possibly get a person's attention? I mean %BLOG_TITLE% is kinda boring. You could glance at Yahoo's home page and watch how they create news headlines to get viewers to open the links. You might add a video or a related picture or two to grab readers excited about everything've written. Just my opinion, it could bring your blog a little bit more interesting.