I'd rather have the icon last, because I can take it within context of the whole post. I never really have a specific idea what I'll be writing about unless it's very fandom-specific and even then, I talk about fandoms I don't have icons or I talk about fandoms I have multiple icons for.

And I kind of liked the grey space. It was nicely delineating, to me.

No idea about the tags -- I'd love that as well. As well as the screen resize, horizontal scrollbars are insanely annoying.