Last time, I left off with all services including ASP.NET installed - ready to kick dasBlog into action.
Installing dasBlog was easy (copy, set directory security, create IIS application, edit config file, done) and I'd already tried it out before to make sure it would be up for the task at hand. That is: run a little more than a blog but make it look and behave more like an actual website.
So the blog would obviously be the frontpage, since that's the biggest chunk of the site and it's updated most (static frontpages are boring). I started off with the preinstalled 'dasBlog' theme which is pretty nice by itself, and modified that a little bit to suit my needs - you know, play around with the colors, locations, disclaimers, css, that kinda stuff. Then I dropped my OPML containing my blogroll into the site (so you know who I read, social networking baby), and I used the 'navigation links' feature to show a list of the posts I think you might want to read most (just to help you filter out the incredible noise 
).
What I really like about dasBlog is that it has a severely underdocumented feature called nested categories, which can show categories in the nifty tree you can see on the site (aggregators don't get this kind of fun). So the key to making it look like a website with some non-blog pages is (ab)using these categories to make pages out of them. They'll show up in the category tree though, so I just called the tree a sitemap to fix that 
But basically it just boils down to adding some 'posts' in 'categories' like 'Projects' and 'Stories' (reminds me of a 'laser' but never mind) and such, and then a sibling feature of dasBlog kicks into action: per-category templates! That means you can make templates defining the page layout per category. So I made a more simple template to get rid of all blog-like formatting like date and time, permalinks, trackbacks, and all that other stuff that makes aunt Jane's head hurt, and assigned those templates to the non-blog pages. Easy enough.
Finally, I used another cool dasBlog feature: Content Filters. These allow you to replace strings or regular expression matches in your posts with something else. For example, they can replace simple things like smileys you type into image tags which actually show a smiley picture. Okay so that's not Nobel Prize stuff but it works pretty well and I decided to use it for a usability feature. I'll save that for a separate post, but I'll leave the regular expression for you as a pop-quiz: href="?(?http[^"\s]+)"? gets replaced into href="${expr}" class="external" target="_blank". Shouldn't be too hard, right? Don't hold back posting your answer into the comments...
So basically, I'm very happy with dasBlog. I got everything I wanted out of it, and it didn't mean touching the code. I was tempted at some points to dig in and add some features but I wouldn't want to be unable to upgrade if there's a new version so I sucked it up. So great work Clemens and everyone who contributed!