Redesigning salonika

I’m doing some maintenance around “this old blog,” tweaking the main design and planning a new version of my Salon blogs category, salonika.
The problem with the current approach is that Radio’s news aggregator encodes certain special characters that Radio’s DHTML whizzy interface inserts into blog entries, and then recodes them or unencodes them differently when an entry from the newsfeed is posted or automatically picked up in my blog.
The choices are to painstakingly clean up the HTML of each post (which I did for a while) or let the articles come through with fucked-up characters, which I’ve been doing lately somewhat out of despair.
My plan now is to stop multiauthor-aggregating the salon blogs categories of other sloggers and instead put RSSboxes on the salonika page featuring the last x headlines from each slogger’s salonblogs category, with links back to their blogs. I think this will work better and could even be adopted as a model by anyone else who wants to manage a similar category: one’s own salon-blog-related posts in the main column, and links to recent salon-blog-related posts from other sloggers in boxes down the side.
I have to remind myself how the boxes work, get them formatted, and then redo the design for the category.
Meanwhile, Secular Blasphemy and No Code have both notified me of their relevant feeds (which I’m afraid I have not picked up yet, as I fiddle with this transition). I kind of like the idea that any of us can link to, feature, or host the salon-blogs categories of everyone else.