Change of plan.  Trying to run the whole thing with Blogger templates did not result in a happy time.  So the main site pulls and manipulates the Blogger RSS feed, with Simple Pie making that easy.

I then simplified the actual Blogger template and made it match and stuff.  The general intention now is that individual posts and comments will be viewed, if necessary, via Blogger, in a kind of archive-y way, but the content organised as I see fit exists on the main site as the primary port of call.

But my goodness does Blogger automatically add some crap into its templates.  I delete stuff and it comes right back.  Pointless classes, and divs, and general unnecessary bulky markup.  I give up with trying to strip all that out.

By the way, the source code for the site is here.  Share and share alike, yada.