I think it's fine the way it is.
I think it looks fine too. Sure colors and photos in the template are nice but i read blogs for the content, not because of how it looks.
Maria
I don't care for fancy stuff like graphics, effects, but I do find it difficult to browse or find stuff here.
I have a list of blogs I follow so I have to space them out and read in spurts. Say now, I want to see what I missed last month or I remember reading something last month that I want to refer to, it's so much easier to be able to click April and all the blog entries would be there and I can go directly to the ones that interest me.
I too want to get to the meat quickly but the way it's structured now, I have to click on the daily archives to find what I want and that's very time consuming, time I may not have.