Just in case you have not had your fill of the previous two code dumps for the workings of the VCU Thought Vectors site… heres more. I can’t stop tinkering. Last weekend Jon Becker emailed and asked if there was “an easy way” to mix together all of the RSS feeds from his students blog […]

creative commons licensed ( BY-NC-SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Holbrook

Now that the Thought Vectors site is out and running (36 blogs syndicating in, 11 of them from registered students, not bad for the day before class starts), it’s time for a bit more of the techie WTF does that do post, in line with previous posts on such syndication hub sites.

WARNING: This post is long and full of jargon. I would like to explain it in a style to be universally understood, but life on this planet is only so long. And hey, did you think I was writing thix blog all these years for you? Silly reader, this writing is for me me ME ME.

How to Syndicate, Nate (Make a new Feed, Reed…)

In response to the idea that a flow of posts from a large community is more than anyone can digest, I’d been contemplating following up on Martin Hawksey’s brilliant work on the octel site and others to make something more like Google Reader (RI) (/me shakes fist and curses at Google, DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL). My interest in being able to do this clouded what Gardner Campbell reminded me, smacks head on table- a Feed Reader is not a beautiful site, one that leverages the media and payout of sites that get people interested in reading.

So less than two weeks ago, Tom Woodward and I got on a Google Hangout and started going through themes they already had available– they have a subscription to Woo Themes. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with modern WordPress themes- they have come with a huge amount of overhead to make admin interfaces. I counted and one I used for another project had over 250 files in it- the crusty old Headspace theme here has like 35. They also can make it hard to do customization (let me tell you how inelegant Elegant themes are).