I'm new to the RSS stuff as well. I recently signed up and use Google Reader, and instead of using the link that was in the original post, I just did a search for feeds within Google Reader (click on "add subscription"), and the "smallwarsjournal.com" search turned up the "SWJ Blog" as the first hit and "Small Wars Council - Powered by vBulletin" as the fourth hit. The message board feed appears to just feed new threads (i.e., the first post in a thread), which is perfect. A feed with every comment would be too much. This took all of about two minutes to do.
I would recommend doing two other feeds:
1) A feed for blog comments. Where this would be helpful is for an older blog post where a new comment won't be seen since the blog is ordered by post date only.
2) If vBulletin supports, allow a subscription to a thread where instead of being emailed, it is sent via RSS.
I haven't explored all the potential of Google Reader, but one thing that is useful is that you can both star a particular post and put tags on it. Thus, it can be catalogued for future use instead of having to get the search words just right. Hope this helps.
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