Comments on: An Uber Comment Feed

By: The Indiana Jones School of Management

The Indiana Jones School of Management — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 21:13:55 +0000

Metafilter Asked

I inadvertently ended up on Ask Metafilter, as it seems that I’m not the only one who wants to let users roll their own syndication feeds.
It’s nice to know that I’m not screaming completely into the vacuum… However, Alex did…

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:13:21 +0000

You’re right – I see that now. I wonder how I missed it the other night…

By: Marcel Marchon

Marcel Marchon — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 18:10:39 +0000

regarding FeedJumbler and editing feeds – if you’re a registered user, you can edit your feeds.

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 03:58:02 +0000

They are included in my JS Quicktags.

By: Jake Bouma

Jake Bouma — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 03:42:23 +0000

Are you using a plugin for your footnotes? I love how that works and would like to implement it in my blog.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:52:26 +0000

Ahhh, see, I thought that you’d have to authenticate. I don’t mind being wrong when it means a lot less work.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:48:17 +0000

Authentication isn’t required for the RSS feed – you can just pass in name, e-mail address and URL as tokens. Or you could pass in a user id – which certainly would be easier if the registration step has already taken place. I may not want to register on joe-random-blog.com, but I might want to track comments from a post there.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:45:12 +0000

Iâ€™m going to put together an â€œRSS feed for comments on posts on this blog that you have commented onâ€? for WordPress at some point as wellâ€¦

See, this is where I think that the new WP 2.0 capabilities could be leveraged: for things like this [which would be generated automatically] and for choosing what categories you want to see items from in your feed. Of course, that will require authentication...

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:14:41 +0000

All WordPress blogs have per-post RSS feeds for comments.

I’m going to put together an “RSS feed for comments on posts on this blog that you have commented on” for WordPress at some point as well…

By: Brett

Brett — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 22:10:55 +0000

I think you might be overthinking things a little. If you subscribe to 12 different comment streams about the same topic and tag them all with “conversations about tracking conversations”, haven’t you roughtly achieved what you want? (I haven’t used feedlounge and might be imagining things incorrectly)

The larger problem is that very few of the comments I’ve seen have RSS feeds. That you have enough of them to aggreggate is impressive!

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 19:00:11 +0000

Awww, thanks for the link. [And here I thought no one was reading!]

I’ve thought about FeedBurnering myself.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 18:58:59 +0000

Hi Greg–

FeedLounge does give nice easy subsscription links to comment feeds on posts, and perhaps that is the best way to handle this. I can subscribe to the comment feeds in FeedLounge and tag them so I can read them all together that way.

However, that doesn’t help me solve my real life use case from yesterday. I was only subscribed to feeds from some of the blogs that were participating in the conversation, so I’d need to go through a “web page to subscription” process somewhere. The only question is “is there value in pre-aggregating these feeds?”.

Unfortunately, since the comment feeds I’m wanting to subscribe to aren’t mine, I can’t set them up to ping anything.

By: Greg Gershman

Greg Gershman — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 18:11:41 +0000

Interesting thoughts; I’d love to have the functionality you describe in my aggregator in some way.

Regarding Blogdigger Groups, our crawler is currently a tad backed up for new feeds; if you ping us, however, things should work much quicker (i.e. every time a new comment is posted to the blog, BD gets a ping, so we index it right away; I realize this is a bit much but it should technically be possible). We should be able to work out some sort of bookmarkable auto-add thingy as well.

But really wouldn’t it be easier to have something like FeedLounge allow a user to set a post for “follow comments?” One less level of indirection.

By: Pete

Pete — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:48:06 +0000

I had been using feedjumbler for a little while myself. But when I redid my photo/text blog from scratch with my own PHP, I was able to make my own custom feeds, both for the photos/text/albums/links, as well as the comments on all of them.

More here: http://www.treemeat.com/text/3/

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 17:09:32 +0000

I can’t see that being a good solution for 3 reasons:

1. To be able to follow the comments, each post would have to be marked as changed/unread whenever there is a new comment.

2. I don’t want to see follow all comments on all posts.

3. I have to be subscribed to someone’s blog feed to subscribe to the comments.