Start writing a client for rendering perlmonks posts, I would write a client using SDL and C++ so that it will be fast but I don't have any sidekick or other person to help me out so I'm just going to forget that thought.
Suggestions like yours have been many, it's true that the site has some problems but I think the strong point is that it's clean, it's a clean website without too much js or flash or whatever, just Perl stuff, which is ok. There are RSS feeds for Perlmonks but those just show the questions in SOPW or Meditations or whatever section but they don't show the follow-up messages... which is not very ok, then again, I don't know if the rss feeds would be good for that since they would overflow with maybe unnecessary information.