And not only that, it is an Atom feed too! (Subscribe with Bloglines, validate, read the announcement)
I am not sure if he writes his feed by hand. Unlike Zeldman Tantek uses Atom which has some requirements that could make it hard for authoring it by hand. Actually, authoring XML by hand is already pretty hard. Besides that, I guess this makes an end of the HTML Syndication Format that never really had a future anyway.
may interest you: RSS 1.1 has gone public (though it's still being worked on)
Yes, I saw it. I am planning to write something on it later.
RSS 1.1 looks much better to me than other versions of RSS, but that doesn't say much. Atom is so much cooler; there's no doubt in my mind that Atom is the way to go!
In case you're interested, I write my feed manually, and use XSLT to generate the HTML pages from it. I don't find it particularly hard at all. I wrote a template once and that was all it took:
<entry> <title></title> <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href=""/> date="$( date -Is -u | sed 's/+0000/Z/' )" ; echo -ne "<id>tag:plasmasturm.org,${date//T/:}-Entry</id>\n<issued>$date</issued>\n<modified>$date</modified>\n" <content mode="xml" type="application/xhtml+xml"><div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> </div></content> </entry> This sits in a comment at the top of the file. I copy it into the content, and when I've finished writing a new entry I filter the line that starts with date= through shell, which creates the datestamp tags I need.