So, until I get more familiar through experience, it's still a learning process for me.  Right now I'm overriding /mod/myplugin/views/object/blog.php to go make a rest call for each blog post that gets rendered.  I'm checking for a true or false value in the response.  If the response is true, change the icon color for that post to green, if the response is false, change the icon color for that post to red. 

Are you saying that the logic that I have in my overridden blog.php object should be in a plugin hook?

Look at this:

'metadata' => $metadata,

in mod\blog\views\default\object\blog.php

This is an entity menu that you can override using hook.

Try to return on your first post. It was correct way.

ok, will do.