aggregating student blogs

I'm using student blogs in a hybrid American lit course, and am trying to figure out the best way to read their work. While writing this query I came up with a solution so I thought I'd send it to the list. Some of my initial attempts at reading student blogs in one place included:

1. Making a wiki page with links to each blog

2. Placing the blogs in a folder in Google reader (this is proving to be surprisingly difficult and counter-intuitive). In addition to folders Google Reader has something called "bundles."

 What I eventually ended up doing was combining their RSS feeds into a single feed and place them in a widget on the course home page. This is proved more difficult than I thought, and took about 2.5 hours of messing around. Chimpfeedr appears to create a useable aggregated feed, but it was difficult to find an rss-->widget creator that actually works, hasn't gone offline, etc.

 Eventually (while drafting this note) I ended up googling around and using this service to create the embedded html widget that shows all of the blogs at once:

http://www.rssdog.com

 So to recap, this is how I cobbled everything together:

1. Asked students to create blogs

2. Copied their blog RSS feeds and used http://mix.chimpfeedr.com to turn them into a single RSS feed.

3. Took that feed over to http://www.rssdog.com/ and created html that I then pasted in a wiki page within Canvas-Instructure. 

Here is the sample feed I created: http://mix.chimpfeedr.com/d503a-amlit-2520 (note: I have since added a late student and created a newer feed)

 I wonder if there is a more elegant solution for aggregating student blogs that I've overlooked. I also don't like depending on free services that could disappear tomorrow.