I've been trying various things for a few days now, and while I'm making a little bit of progress, it's not going nearly as well as I'd hoped, so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction.

We're trying to make a site that has user blogs (already done, of course), where each of the individual blogs will display some extra information in the sidebar like you would find in blog-oriented things like Blogger or WordPress (what I'm having trouble with). I've figured out block visibility, but now I'm having trouble getting the logic to pull the right user info.

On 'blog/username', the sidebar should be able to display the following items: * Fields from username's profile (provided by the Profile module) * The picture (avatar) for username * A list of the five most recent posts by username of type blog. * Either a visual calendar (such as is provided site-wide by the Archive module) or list of months (as provided sitewide by http://drupal.org/node/52037) showing when posts where made (and how many in each time period), BUT only dealing with posts by username, again of type blog (not all posts). * A "blogroll" of links if desired by the user.

This is taking a bit longer than I can really afford to invest right now, so if you could help me out with whatever will be an efficient way of accomplishing that it would be much appreciated. (Note: I have started reading about modules, blocks, and views, but have only a scant understanding so far.)