In a similar vein, the blockquote really needs to have some surrounding white space, as it is it is really crowded. Oh, and you should just give up and write your own blog software, its better than way. :)
That would really depend on how you implemented comments. As you move toward requiring users to login/verify themselves this becomes more likely that users will not bother. Larger blogging platforms can often diminish this barrier because you only have to make an account for their entire network of blogs.
You can reduce/avoid that problem by not requiring logins, or by patching into an existing network (OpenID is the way of the future ya know). I don't think that is a major issue though (what I would worry more would be scalability).
It was mostly a joking comment so take it with a grain of salt. I built my own blog software and it (along with configuring the server its hosted on) has been a bit more of an extended learning process than I expected.
