New Drupal-powered site: www.assignblame.com

No, I actually wrote some custom code for that. I've thought about trying to modularize it, but it's not easy.

You're right about the favicon.ico -- that was on the todo list and got completely missed!
I hang my head in shame!

Excellent to hear! Frequent commentors will likely be made moderators =)

It's not blocks, but it's a system that's a little bit like blocks. I wrote the code and it's unfortunately somewhat crude. To be properly modulable it would need quite a bit of cleanup.

If you're comfortable with PHP coding, I can post the 'dashboard' code (which basically is a series of themes that make it easy to add and remove content from the 2 column structure). If I'd done it with full flexibility in mind, I would actually use an array and let it be an arbitrary number of columns, not just 2, but I'm not entirely sure how to even manage that properly with CSS!

This is what the code that generates the front page looks like:

  $leadnid = variable_get('private_leadnid', 0);
  if ($leadnid) {
    $node = node_load(array('nid' => $leadnid));
    if ($node->nid)
      $top = theme('dashboard_component', node_view($node, true, false, true), '', 'leadarticle');
  }

  $us = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(19), l("U.S.", "articles/us"), "us");
  $pol = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(21), l("Politics", "articles/politics"), "politics");
  $law = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(22), l("Law", "articles/law"), "law");

  $int = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(20), l("International", "articles/international"), "international");
  $edu = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(23), l("Education", "articles/education"), "education");
  $bus = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(24), l("Business", "articles/business"), "business");
  $art = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(11), l("Newest Articles", "articles"), "newest-articles");
  $edi = theme('dashboard_component', private_term_list(12), l("Newest Editorials", "editorials"), "newest-editorials");

  $left = $art . $us . $pol . $bus;
  $right = $edi . $int . $law . $edu;

  $output = theme('dashboard', 'main', $left, $right, $top);

  print theme('page', $output);

This is the dashboard theming code:

// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Dashboard themes

function theme_dashboard($id = '', $left = '', $right = '', $top = '', $bottom = '') {
  if ($id)
    $idstr = " id='component-$id'";
  $output = "<div class='dashboard'$idstr>\n";
  if ($top) 
    $output .= "<div id='top'>$top</div>";
  $output .= "<div id='left'>$left</div>";
  $output .= "<div id='middle'>&nbsp;</div>";
  $output .= "<div id='right'>$right</div>";
  if ($bottom) 
    $output .= "<div id='bottom'>$bottom</div>";

  $output .= "</div>\n";
  return $output;
}

function theme_dashboard_component($comp = '', $title = '', $id = '') {
  if (!$comp)
    return '';

  if ($title)
    $titlestr = "<h2>$title</h2>\n";
  if ($id)
    $idstr = " id='component-$id'";
  return "<div class='component'$idstr>\n$titlestr $comp\n</div>\n";
}

And bah, the input filter is eating my nice indenting. I'm sure there's a way to get it not to, but I dunno what it is.

And the CSS For the dashboard. (My CSS fu is really weak; there are probably more concise ways to do this, and perhaps more 'correct' ways, but I went with what seemed to work).

.dashboard {
  vertical-align: top;
}

.dashboard table {
  width: 520px;
  font-size: 16px;
}

.dashboard ul {
/*  display: block; */
  margin-top: 3px;
}

.dashboard li {
  display: block;
  font-size: 0.8em;
  line-height: 1em; 
}

.dashboard h2 {
  font-size: 0.9em; 
}

.dashboard #top, .dashboard #bottom {
  width: 100%;
}

.dashboard #left {
  float: left;
  width: 48%;
  margin: 0 0 0 0;
  padding: 0 0 0 0;
}

.dashboard #middle {
  float: left;
  width: 4%;
  padding: 0 0 0 0;
  margin: 0 0 0 0;
}
.dashboard #right {
  float: left;
  width: 48%;
  padding: 0 0 0 0;
  margin: 0 0 0 0;
}

.dashboard td {
  vertical-align: top;
}

.dashboard .component {
  margin-bottom: 1.1em;
}

.dashboard p {
  margin-left: 12px;
  font-size: .8em;
}

.dashboard #top p {
  margin-left: 0px;
  font-size: 1em;
}

.dashboard td#middle {
  width: 20px;
}

.dashboard td#left {
  width: 240px;
}

.dashboard td#right {
  width: 240px;
}

#component-main h2 a {
  color: #333;
}

#component-main #left h2 a:hover, #component-main #right h2 a:hover  {
	text-decoration: underline;
	color: #05b;
}

(Also, I like how the <code> doesn't eat spaces, but the PHP one does)