to be honest, and it's not a defensible position now that I write it out loud, but I wait for your blog post to get to HN. I have not yet found people whose writing I find compelling enough and do not either mail me or end up on HN.
Possibly I see my inbox as an RSS feed (I subscribe, you send me mails)
What seems painful about it for you? IMHO handling feeds is only painful if you have/want to switch readers or if you want to browse old archives. Other than that, you just drop a blog URL in your reader and it gets you the updates.
I use websec for a few such blogs, it emails me the content and even highlights the changed parts in the page.
It's a program I inherited after it was abandoned and did some maintenance on so I'm biased, I haven't updated it for a long while now and for a time even wrote a python alternative since I actually dislike Perl.
You can use Firefox's Live Bookmarks, which get updated every time you open the bookmark. To add an RSS feed, just go the feed page and take a look at what's on top of the page, it should be easy to understand.
