What makes Blogger seem so dated in contrast to other blog systems is that you cannot create static pages, but do we need them?
My instinct on the website is to add in a few extra pages for things like 'About' which would be static pages normally.

Blogger has no ability to add static pages though, so what do we do?

Well I think there are two methods here. Firstly, post the page as a date-ordered item anyway and just link to it and try and ignore that is archived by date.
Or secondly, go with the blogging system that works and make everything date relevant.

About

For starters, I thought that an 'About' page doesn't need to be static anyway since it is current information and the fact that it actually ages in the blog archives is actually quite useful as people get to know how old that information is. It also means that when information changes, you can do a new page and people get to see that it has updated and been posted as new.

So for 'About', I can make a normal blog page about myself and post it in the normal way. The only thing different I can do is a the perma-link for it to my main menu so it is always available.

You could even do an 'About Me' tag and link to that. Then you could post updates as they happen and make a super-about-page that gets added to when things change in your life. This would also fit neatly with most blogs as the actual generic 'about me' text is often always displayed in the side column anyway (the way Blogger got around not providing static pages?).

Portfolio

Then I would normally have a portfolio page. Does this have to be static considering it is time relevant information?
It would go quite nicely as normal blog posts each labelled with a unique tag which again, can be perma-linked to the main menu.

Contact

For most websites, a contact page is often redundant (despite usability guidelines).
My opinion is that if you have any contact details (more than an email address), then they should be displayed on every page as they will be that important.
I guess a site could still use a standalone contact page if there were multiple contacts or maps etc that needed to be used.
My contact details consist of emails and IM clients. So what should I do with this information?

It's not exactly date sensitive/relevant so to post as a blog item would seem a little weird.

For me, I think it's best to have a little box, always on display for this info.

Photos

Trickier this one, but I think it is a case of getting it to work for you as date sensitive information.

I have my photos on Flickr. I could just embed the RSS on a post page and perma-link to it but I think this would not feel right.

Lifehacker has already spoken about RSS to email services, so you could get one of the services to email you your own new photos on RSS and then bounce that straight back to Blogger as a new blog post.
I have tried this method, but due to the email subject and other guff your get attached to your email, it makes your blog post a spammy mess.

Currently the best solution I can think of is to just add your Flickr RSS stream to a blog post and perma-link it to the main menu and make do.

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Posted By Justin Fleming to Justin Fleming's Fuchsia Shock - Freelance UK webdesign & marketing, ideas man and muse on 3/30/2008 02:59:00 PM