I managed to change the layout once again, basically to reflect the ‘No-Nonsense’ feeling. Additional changes are yet to come for the categories page and other archiving matters. It did cost me time to get this layout right, and I wasn’t sure if it was actually possible.
What I basically did was to use a table layout for the first two recent items: the first item is retrieved using the <MTEntries lastn=1> macro. The second one has only an offset of 1. The rest of items that follows has a lastn value of 10 plus an offset of 2.
To make things worse, I had to play around with the fonts too. But anyways, it’s possible within Movable Type. Without the use of plug-ins.