My previously posted XSLT and RSS block approach has the problem that there's nothing to force the GUI to update even though the RSS block is updating. DW put me on to CMcN who created an RSS feed block widget which addresses exactly our need (i.e. get title of each of N items from the RSS feed and make each a link using the link element for that item in the RSS).
Remaining problem is that the "see blog" generated at the bottom of the list by their widget uses the value of the link element for the overall feed. In the first place, our RSS feed generator assumed the call would be coming from other pages on our site, so generated a relative URL when invoked from the Cascade site; secondly, even if it generated the correct URL, that would be to the URL feed and not to the home page in our hcmc account for the blogs interface, so I manually edited the code generating the RSS to generate a hard-coded link to the home page for the blog. That should fix the problem.