Control over date layout

The date is forced onto a newline after the title. I can force it up on the same line by brute-hacking the code and change the hardcoded <p> to an <a> tag in the cat-posts.php.

I wish there was a better way to obtain control over the position of the date. Ideally I would like the date to appear just before the title in a list-like manner, sort of like a database list.