Steve and I were discussing yesterday’s conversation about scalability over dinner last night. He’d seen a few responses that I’d missed (mainly in the comments) and vice-versa.
Subscribing to RSS feeds for comments on an individual post is a handy way to keep track of these conversations, but subscribing to each RSS feed is a bit awkward1. One semi-solution I thought of was using a feed mashup service to create an uber comment feed of sorts. Of course, you then have to maintain that uber feed, but I’m trying it out anyway.
I tried using FeedJumbler to create the combined feed but it doesn’t seem to allow me to maintain the combined feed (add and remove items from it). Blogdigger Groups looks like a better solution, but my mashup feed from Blogdigger doesn’t have any items in it yet. Being able to add a feed to the mashup via bookmarklet would be handy too (that looks “hackable” for Blogdigger).
Perhaps I’m overthinking this and I should just subscribe directly to the comment feeds themselves, but for some reason I like the idea of putting them all together (pre-aggregating them, if you will)2.
Thoughts?
- Geof has been thinking about this quite a bit. [back]
- I’m also considering doing this for feeds from folks like Geof who have a half-dozen different blogs, each with their own feeds. [back]
I like what sharpReader does it, displays the comments like they are follow up to the blog post, (Which I suppose they are) in the same way as a usenet client or email client displays threads.
On second thought maybe that wasn’t sharpReader. I know I had a whole bunch of reader installed for a while and one of them did this.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Awww, thanks for the link. [And here I thought no one was reading!]
I’ve thought about FeedBurnering myself.
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!
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…
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…
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.
Ahhh, see, I thought that you’d have to authenticate. I don’t mind being wrong when it means a lot less work. 🙂
Are you using a plugin for your footnotes? I love how that works and would like to implement it in my blog.
They are included in my JS Quicktags.
regarding FeedJumbler and editing feeds – if you’re a registered user, you can edit your feeds.
You’re right – I see that now. I wonder how I missed it the other night…
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…