The good news is that I managed to figure out why the stylesheets were failing; I'm a doofus, and I didn't convert to *nix line endings. (Which perhaps shouldn't matter, but seemed to for some reason.)
The bad news is that Newser still isn't resolving IDs to names properly, so getting it to submit a story to the database requires severe honesty on the part of the submitter -- you have to put your user id in manually. It's like one of those ancient games written by non-humans where it asks if you have the right key and lets you in if you say 'yes' when it asks.
Back to code...
