How to organize all this crap

Somebody just asked me what we are going to do with the left-hand column of the blog, now that all the comments are going here, on the message board.

1. The comments are still active on old blog entries, so "What They Say" continues to update. But it would be nice to have something similar for the comments on this board. However, as you can see here, the efforts to date have not been successful:
http://www.dailyheights.com/archives/2005/08/_subscribe_to_r.html
We have the RSS feed, the question is just now, how to gather the RSS data and automatically reformat it for the sidebar, a la Feedburner or RSS-to-Javascript.com.

2. Because new people are discovering this site all the time, we're starting to get a lot of queries for things that we've discussed in the past. This is good, because things are always changing, and asking the question again stimulates new discussion on new stuff. But it still would be nice to have some way to organize all the information in the blog, this message board and the ProHo Guide (wiki). Ideally, it wouldn't be something that has to be continually updated by a human, because then it will fall to the wayside and never get done. The best solution so far is this dailyheights.com-specific site search, which is OK, but horribly inconsistent - a search for "The Islands" misses the message board discussions, and a search for "Muddy Waters" misses the entry on the ProHo Guide wiki... Any ideas? Custom search engines?