A broad palette of cryptic devices at play in this puzzle, with some (e.g 14,24,25) depending as much on lateral thinking as orthodox solving mechanisms. I did think that 21 was a little de trop, though.

Across
1 VA(-r)NISHING POINT - a seamless combination of wordplay and definition, resulting in an admirably unrelated surface reading.
11 E in MADE LINE - another great surface, exploiting the ambiguity of “row” as a homograph.
12 SOLVE,NT - for non-Brits, “trust” here alludes to the National Trust (NT) - a body that keeps stately piles and the like shipshape and open for public viewing. 
14 THE,FT - an overly-familiar device but the first time I’ve seen it used self-referentially, as in “what’s under your nose”.
19 FLYWEIGHT - (yew)* in flight; using “box” to create, once again, a totally disparate yet smooth surface.
20 ROGUE - A pirogue is a “dugout” canoe.
25 INSTANT - “How sextant embodies former” is a literal pointer to the construction (ex in stant). Imaginative stuff.
28 AD,MIT(-t)
Down
2 A,R(TILLER)Y
6 POL(ICE,C)AR - The “arctic” medley of polar and ice is a nice idea, but might be one of those that works better in theory than execution. I think Panda can be used to refer to any type of police car, although I’ve always tended to associate the term with those dinky little Ford Escort-type ones.
7 I,D(I)OT - Re: Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot(one of those literary classics which I will probably never get around to reading).
15 T,R,ENCHANT - A salute from Satori to those Marc Bolan die-hards out there.
19 L,EG,W(ARM)ER - I liked this &lit clue, particularly as it doesn’t strike me as an easy word to define otherwise.
19 F(ERR)O,US - If you twigged the “Irony” definition straight away then you’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din.
21 ENTITY - “Being of no value to eventuality” doesn’t work for me.  Surely there should be an acknowledgement that the subtracted letters require jumbling?
24 EIGHT - Not too tricky, but an innovative ploy. “One third of this” referring to the clue number (i.e 24/3=8)

One of the advantages of moving the blog to its own domain is that I’m able to get much more information about who’s reading us. It’s amazing the stuff you can find out:

86% of you are in Europe (and 80% of that number are in the UK), 6.3% are in the US, 3.4% are in Asia and 1.9% are in Australia and New Zealand. We have some readers in places that you wouldn’t immediately associate with cryptic crosswords, so a big hello to our readers in Arhus, Stuttgart, Rijswijk, Wisconsin and Illinois!

64% browse the site using Internet Explorer and 23% use Firefox. I haven’t checked the market share figures recently but it looks like you’re reflecting the growing popularity of the Mozilla browser. Safari (the Apple produced browser for Mac OS and, very recently, Windows) is used by 7% and, somewhat surprisingly, Opera is only used by 1%. I thought Opera was more popular than that. Hopefully the blog is browser-agnostic and displays pages the same (or near as possible) whatever you use.

60% of you access the site using a connection equivalent to DSL or faster and I hope that the 6% using dialup connections don’t find the site too slow to load.

38% of you have your monitors set to 1024 x 768 resolution (I’ve no idea how this is determined) but 2.5% have it set to a squint-inducing 1680 x 1050. Maybe you lot have bigger monitors than everyone one else. If you’re wondering how this piece of information could possibly be useful to me - it is. The next time I play around with the look of the blog and try out different themes I’ll know which resolutions to try it out in to see if it looks ok.

34% of you own a dog and 23% go to bed no later than 10PM - only kidding. If you’re worried that I might be able to find out more about you than you’d prefer to reveal, then I’d like to put your mind at rest. The stats I have access to are all anonymous and don’t go into any more greater detail than what I’ve already shown you.

And finally, when you visit you stay for an average of 5 minutes and lots of you visit us more than once a day. I hope you’ll continue to do so.

Neil