One of the things you run into when your blog becomes bigger, is that you need to cram more info into less space, to make it possible to display all the information you want to show. One of the things Chris did to do that is add an icon for the date, and then a bubble over that with the number of comments in it. As you can see, the “shield” shows the day, the month, and the number of comments. “Date Badges and Comment Bubbles for Your Blog” shows you exactly how to get that effect.

Source: Date Badges and Comment Bubbles for Your Blog