The mailing list is having some trouble surviving, too. Apparently at some point Google decided our domain was spammy, and all the Gmail subscribers started getting their mail automatically spam-filtered. I contacted a bunch of people directly (via Google Talk or Facebook) to get them to fish the latest mail out of the spambox.
Beyond that, I don't know what to do. I guess I could post more often.
Managing a site through a DVCS is, IMO, a good idea. (I do it for my own site, http://www.gwern.net/ ). But I think your worries are somewhat groundless. If you are interested in preventing patent problems years down the line, there's no need for fancy cryptographic commitment schemes; you could probably just appeal to archive sites like the Internet Archive or WebCitation. When you access their archived pages, the pages come with timestamps in the frame or as part of the URL.
(I know that the Internet Archive has been used by some courts for one purpose or another, though I don't know that it has been employed for demonstrating prior art.)
That said, if you investigated existing cryptographic time-stamping services (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping#External_l...) and figured out how to integrate them into a DVCS (a shell script called from cron?), I would certainly find that an interesting thing to read on Hacker News.
"Smalltalk Performance and Moore's Law" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...
"OCaml vs. SBCL, and various other interpreters" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-March/0...
"what affects programming language adoption?" http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2006-Novembe...
(kragen is also kragen here)