Registering is surprisingly easy. "If you didn't set a password, you don't have one."

Good idea....

But if it is that easy I suggest you move the register field to the front page. Just seeing a link that says register will lose you a lot of potential customers because a link that says "register" is normally associated with a form field that goes on for pages and people will not bother clicking. I know I didn't until I read you comment.

I think you will up your conversion ratio about 25% by doing this.

Probably higher than 25%-- it's why I navigated away.

Yeah you might be right.

People should be doing much more A/B split testing of their sites, especially the important parts such as sign-ups and buying.

I built a very similar site a few months back as a way to learn Rails and make a few bucks. It's called http://toreadlist.com/ , and one of the features was not requiring registration. It also had RSS feeds.

Yes; we should at least get some screenshots, or live demo.