I’m surprised that The Straight Dope doesn’t have an RSS feed. Practically all news sites, blogs, forums, etc. have an RSS feed these days. It’s very widely used.
It means that people get notified each time there is new post, so they don’t have to remember to visit the site each day. It’s a very convenient way to keep track of a number of sites of interest, and many people use RSS all the time.
An RSS facility can only increase traffic to your site, and it shouldn’t be too difficult to add.