After several months of part-time hacking, I've finally gotten this site on the air. As described in my original site design document, everything is based on XML, Emacs and Perl. The RSS feeds, cross-references and archive system all appear to be working properly.

If you're interested in automating your news site with these tools, please let me know--if there's enough demand, I'll refactor the code a bit and package it up for distribution.