So I’ve finally broken down and installed an RSS aggregator. For now I’ve been using SharpReader which seems to do a reasonable job - supports different RSS formats, images are downloaded automatically, you can categorize feeds, familar interface. There are enough sources on the Net with a RSS feed I want to read that it makes sense to let them come to me. I can already see how if a weblog doesn’t have a good RSS feed people who use aggregators will just skip it.
So I tweaked the RSS feed for this site so that it will show up reasonably (times are correct, links to individual items work, etc.).