driz, in answer to your query regarding the Carsonified site, we do indeed simply use ‘/blog/’ in the permalink (using a page called ‘Blog’ and setting ‘Posts page’ under ‘Settings > Reading’ to ‘Blog’).
If you’re not using / displaying / relying on the author field you could potentially use that to create a second ‘category’ for use in the URL structure / post separation, bit of a bodge but might do the trick.
