New Look of Planet Indra

I encountered quite a lot of problems when I used the Blue Horizon theme for Planet Indra. The sidebar.php file is not really easy to modify, making it difficult for me to add some widget scripts there. For example, it's a bit difficult for me to add the scripts to show the Kronologis sideblog and Oggix shoutbox there. Well, I can still add the widgets there, but the whole sidebar layout will become very messy. My friend JaF even told me that he always sees the sidebar dangling (is dangling the correct word for "melorot" in English?), using either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

In view of this, I decided to give a new look for Planet Indra. After searching and testing various WordPress themes, I decided to use the Golden Grey theme, by William Pramana. Well, of course it's not because William is sharing the same last name as I am :) , but because I really like the layout design. And, the most important thing, it's much easier to modify the sidebar.php file to insert the necessary gadgets that I want. The Kronologis box also fits nicely in the sidebar, resolving the dangling problem.

Both JaF and Rani introduced Twitter to me, which has features similar to what Kronologis offers. I have signed up for an account there, but so far I haven't been fully making use of it. At the moment, I'm quite happy to use Kronologis for my sideblog, and so far I haven't had a plan to switch. :) Well, I might want to use Twitter for my sideblog in English, since currently I'm using bahasa Indonesia for my Kronologis sideblog. We'll see. :)

Syndication Problem Resolved, Aggregators Now Showing Full Articles

At last, I have managed to find a workaround to the syndication problem on my aggregation sites such as Planet Indra and Planet Singapura, thanks to Alarix and Isman. As reported earlier, the syndication sites, which are actually Wordpress engine using FeedWordPress plugin, were only showing the titles (instead of the full articles) of articles being syndicated from Blogger-based weblogs, especially after the blogs were being upgraded to the new Blogger.

A discussion on a Blogfam forum's thread revealed that one of Blogfam's system administrators, Alarix, encountered the same problem when he's launching Rumah Blogfam, an aggregator site for Blogfam's members, which happens to also use FeedWordPress. Another Blogfam member, Isman, also looked into this matter and he managed to find out that the problem was due to the incompatibility between FeedWordPress and the Atom feed published by the Blogger-based weblogs.

He suggested to use the RSS 2.0 feed published by Blogspot to be used as the feed source, instead of the Atom feed. The URL format of the RSS 2.0 feed in weblogs under Blogspot (after being upgraded to the new Blogger) is:

http://(blog-name).blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

On top of that, he also suggested to use FeedBurner to burn the feed source, instead of syndicating the feed source directly, similar to what Fatih has suggested to me earlier.

So, these are the steps of workaround I've performed:

1. Use FeedBurner to burn the above RSS 2.0 feed (instead of the Atom feed);
2. Configure my FeedWordPress to syndicate the Feedburner feed address, i.e. http://feeds.feedburner.com/(feed-name); and
3. Upgrade my FeedWordPress to the latest version 0.981.

And, voila, the above steps resolved the problem. You can see the results on the new posts being syndicated by Planet Indra and Planet Singapura, it's now showing the full articles instead of the titles only.

Again, thanks to Isman, Alarix and Fatih for all the hints and suggestions. Really appreciate it. :)

The Coffee Club

Last Friday (13 April 2007), I and my wife went to The Coffee Club, which is located on the third floor of the bright and airy Raffles City Shopping Centre, which is located just above the City Hall MRT station, Singapore.

The Coffee Club itself is a chain of coffee shops located throughout Singapore, similar to Starbucks and The Coffee Bean. However, usually we don't go to Coffee Club for the coffee. Our (especially my wife's) favourite is the fresh fruit fondue, some fresh fruits such as strawberries, mangoes, kiwis and bananas served with hot thick chocolate.

I also ordered the muddy mud pie, which is actually ice cream cake served on top of oreo-based cake layer. The only drink we ordered was the ice rambutan, which is much similar to Al-Azhar's rambutan spin.

More pictures can be found here.