So I quickly added three more lines to call tzset and tzname, and now assign
a tz variable which can be used in the rss format. One minor annoyance is
that the setting itself is still in the flavour file
/usr/share/blosxom/timezone -- so I dpkg-divert
'ed mine.
If you see this via rss aggregation at planetdebian, it should show with a time of very early in the (UTC) morning whereas I type this at 21:00h Chicago time.
By the way, if someone wants to take over maintaining blosxom for Debian, drop me line.