I guess my weblog software isn’t quite as horrible as it looks.
I've managed to add support for both the dsw syndication formats in a form that doesn't cause the tiny subset of syndication viewers I use to completely freeze up and die. First I added support for rss 2.0, and then it took me about 55 minutes to add support for Atom.
Of the two formats, I much prefer rss. It's dumb, but it gets the job done without too much verbiage. Atom, on the other hand, is like a swiss army knife; it might be much better if you wanted to use it for posting articles while skydiving, but it really lards up the syndication file with redundant crap.
But at least it's in and it appears to validate, so I won't have to worry about it until the people at wherever the format comes from decide to redo it in a completely incompatable way (cf: Perl, php, C [grrr!], C++, etc etc etc)