I been hammering it out with Feeds.KuwaitBlogs.com since I got home. I love just bashing it with Wordpress and its PHP and template tags. Finally getting FeedWordpress to work is just great. I’ve tried it before but had issues with it not updating and an aggregator not updating is no use at all.

So here is where the fun begins. I hammered out some good stuff with it. I tried to recall all the issues we have had with Safat, and even just getting a decent RSS feed setup for it.

One issue that people always hated and I spent ages with other programs trying to cut it was the long posters. You know the ones, you just see it and then page long post about nothing. Well NO MORE. Little edit in the code and it will just show excerpts of the posts. So now you can get a quick glance of the post and continue down not having to read the whole thing, and this also removes pictures. Yes, pictures are pretty, but when you want to see what is new, and have to wait for a picture to load, or take up space it gets annoying.

Another feature, more of a hack is RSS feed of it. It is nothing exciting except for people who use. It will give you a better idea of who posted as Blog Name : Post Title, and attribute the author to Blog Name. It is something I felt was important cause seeing a list of posts on my personal aggregator I had no idea who posted that post unless I clicked on it to see author. This way you know which blog it came from.

The other thing that really helps out cause of excerpts is that it now will show you a days worth of post on the first page. Previous pages will show the previous day posts. This will really make it easier for people to read up on a days worth of posts and not have to hit previous all the time to catch up.

Since each aggregated posts is added to the blog, it makes it all searchable and archival . This feature is not that exciting now. But I believe in the future as more content is added it will really help out trying to find out information, and a zeitgeist of mood during the time.

I am going to mess with the theme for a bit, to find a really basic one that shows the content, as well as keep things to the minimum. I plan to remove the blog roll and have it on a separate page since that isn’t information people need to know. The sidebar will just contain the Kuwait Blog’s posts, and KuWiki (once I bring it back) ones.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for themes, and such, or even what to have on the side bar concerning Kuwait just drop it in the comments.