As alluded to in the marcspages link, a blinking LED often wouldn't like the applied voltage going to zero periodically and has a nonuniform power consumpotion. With the mains dropper resistor approach, you'd still likely need a rectifier and capacitor and zener or other crude regulator to give it something resembling continuous power.
Do the LEDs work on 5V? If so, I'd be mighty tempted to hook up a generic cell phone/USB charger doohicky as the power supply (probably with a fuse to ease the paranoid mind).
