Its been running for over 6 months :), ended up being a side project. We are running tokyo tyrant (disk based), so that has slowed down over time. Will tune that up!
As for the breaks and paragraphs, planning to add more logic when lines are picked up from different para. Thanks for the feedback!
What's the best way to hire a UI guy/gal to jazz up a site? Where to find them?
You can look on https://dribbble.com/ . They have a 'search by skills' feature here https://dribbble.com/skills
Other thing is speed. I guess that you're fetching feeds for every user request. You should think about caching and return precached results only or server will die with big amount of visitors.