The funny thing about feed readers is that we actually only care about the UI, not the underlying feed fetching and parsing and whatever else happens on the server.

So, when I made my feed reader — this has got to be the most popular pastime of the last few months around here — I ended up taking the lazy approach and made a UI that sat on top of the NewsBlur API. Thus, I now have a NewsBlur account, all the messy date parsing and everything else gets done on NewsBlur's servers, and I access it through my own much prettier interface that works just how I want it to work (http://www.altfeedreader.com). For anybody still thinking about making a feed reader, I definitely recommend this approach.