Another tip that may be useful to you is that the RSS feed manager (among many other features) allows you to specify a custom CSS class. Feed manager wraps the incoming link text in "h3" tags. So, if you wanted all of your RSS feed text to appear different than the rest of the h3s around the site, you could set a custom CSS class on the feature instances (example: "rss-block"), then do something like this in CSS:
h3 {font-size: 31px; font-style: normal;}
.rss-block h3 {font-size: 15px; font-style: italic;}
For your item #2, it's on Joe's to-do list. You can read more about it in this thread.
Jamie