Thank you all for the kind and helpful comments!
premiumwp: Many thanks! I agree with your assessment; I removed the social sharing icons on the excerpts and believe it has been a boon to the blog’s appearance. I’ll have to toy a bit more with the content column width, but the three-column layout in Thesis (my theme) is awfully finicky.
satty005: Thank you!
admreal: Thank you as well. It is in fact a plug-in called Simple-Press. The whole forum is itself a plug-in, and it’s free. Implementing the integration aspect (e.g., auto-generate blog posts and comments in the forum), however, costs a bit of cash. ($39 gives you full access to downloading every available plugin for Simple-Press–the blog-linking plugin is just one of many.)
The feedback has been helpful so far–many thanks to anyone else who would like to chime in!
Whoops, I did have it as %postname% in my permalink panel; I just incorrectly wrote it here. Thank you for the suggestion, though!
