The two problems are solved very well by Mozilla Firefox. You only need to customize the browser to drag the feed button to the toolbar. Whenever it is not grayed out, you know there is a RSS feed available for the current website or page, and you can click on it to view the feed and click "Subscribe Now" to subscribe to it in your default feed reader.
It's a shame that they don't ship it by like that by default. Even if it's "easy" to customize it's still is frustrating trying to explain it to computer illiterate relatives.
