Recently I stumbled across NewsBruiser, which runs Leonard Richardson's and a bunch of his friends' blogs. It's got this pleasing low-tech homebrew feel to it. I've been programming web applications for 10 years now. While my specialty is the back-end I can crank out a passable user interface, but I guess I'm getting jaded by all these WordPress sites that look fancy but all use the same templates.
Leonard's site is definitely not glitzy, but it's got this honesty and directness to it that I really appreciate. Here's a man who has more important things to do with his time than dick around with stylesheets. NewsBruiser is the fixie of blog software.
It's not alone - there's a lot of one-off personal software out there. In the Django community there's a culture of rolling your own blog app that inspired me to write the software that powers this site. Like a fixie, it's not flashy but I wrote it and it does what I want it to. It speaks to a part of me that values simple machines that I can fix myself. Now I might event be inspired to remove the stylesheets... <!-- SUMMARY_END -->