Best way to have a "sub blog" with different style, not on front page

I've been running drupal for a while and the front page /node is my blog. This is to say that blog posts are auto-promoted to the front page, though I can put other things there if I wish. I've run into a couple of issues doing it that way.

First, I wanted to give other users blogs. Those other users would not be posting to the front page. Unfortunately "promote to front page" for blog nodes is global, they either all default to that, or none of them do. Having to manually remember to promote mine is no good. I could start using a different node/content type for my postings, but then the blog would just end, and I would have to pull some database games or aliases. I could try that if it were that important.

However, I also want to create a "sub-blog" for myself. This is a blog about a particular topic, whose posts do not show up in the main blog, ie. on the front page, except in very rare occasions. The sub-blog is part of the site, but should really look like its own little entity. I created a new content type for the sub-blog posts, which works OK, and I created a "view" so people could see the whole sub-blog and read it as a feed.

However, it would be nice if the sub-blog postings had their own look, and most importantly if they had a link taking people to the sub-blog's home page instead of/in addition to the main home page. I don't want to create a whole sub-site with its own database tables, though, especially not now.

Should I use CCK to customize the nodes and put these things in, or is there another recommended module for changing the look of a paritcular content type (not with forms, but static data for each node?) I plan to go to Drupal 6 but it seems CCK and Views are not fully ready there yet.

What's a favoured way to do this sort of thing?