One of the reasons I wanted to move my blogs to a self-hosted site was to have more flexibility in designing the look of the site and to learn a few things along the way. I tweaked the look of an existing template and more or less left it alone for a while. I recently began playing around with the look a bit more. A lot of those changes haven’t gone live yet, but a few have, like creating some white space around all the items in the sidebars. And I’ve been playing around with what I want in the sidebars on Being and Formulating.
My point being is that as I test different options, the look of the sites may look a bit funky (not necessarily in a good way) from time to time. If you are just reading the feed, then, of course, none of this matters.