Tool for tracking new posts on blogs I enjoy?

Yes there are services that monitor web pages and email you if the content changes. Sorry their names escape me right now but I know they exist.

Also don't think some blogs are RSS-free: they might simply be not advertising their feeds well and not enabling autodiscovery.

What blogs these days don't have RSS?

Unless they rolled their own CMS, just about every blog these days has at least basic RSS feeds. They might not advertise it, but throw the website's URL into Google Reader and it'll detect the feeds and add them anyway.

I use this service for creating RSS feeds from sites that don't have one: http://page2rss.com/