Comment Notifications Now Available

I get tired of chasing my tail. You leave a comment in somebody’s blog, then a comment in yet another blog (repeat N-1 times). Then you go back to blog #1 and check if anyone has responded to you (unless it was a “fire-and-forget” opinion), and so on—visit N-1 blogs for that same reason. A little later is starts all over again. I find this disconnect inefficient.

I’ve spent a few days and added a new feature to this blog. Nothing revolutionary. Nothing at all. It’s just something I really want to see in others’ blogs so I wouldn’t have to run around.

Every blog post has a subscription link now. Just follow it, enter your email, and you’ll be notified when somebody posts a comment to this particular post. Each notification will have an unsubscribe link. In case of emergency I have a plug to pull on notifications to temporarily disable (hide) them until the problem is resolved.

As I say over and over again—and it doesn’t hurt to repeat—I hate junk peddlers as much as you do and therefore do not share your emails with anyone.

Please let me know of any problems.

One solution to this that I've seen on other sites (that I actually like better than the email idea) is to provide a separate RSS feed of the comments that you can subscribe to in your RSS reader. Using some RSS extension I can't remember off the top of my head, my RSS reader can even display the comments under the post automatically, with newer items highlighted. That's a really nice way to follow a discussion without reverting to the old "mailing-list" notification style. I think most .Text blogs do this by default, for example, http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/

I've added [wfw:commentRss] to my RSS feed specifically for this, so you should bee seeing a comment feed in your reader. I think SharpReader "gets" it, but my Omea Reader doesn't.

None of the blogs I read, which are powered by MovableType, WordPress and the like, provide comment feeds though.

Hmm. It seems that at least in RSS Bandit, the wfw:comments tag is enough to add a "Comments..." link to the bottom, but a "slash:comments" tag that's constantly updated to the number of comments is actually what triggers the auto-comments view.

There's also the fact that your CommentRSS link seems to go to an RSS file with no comments in it, just an empty channel. That could be it, too.

You could add a "Subscribe to an RSS feed of the comments to this post" link if you already have a comment RSS feed (or when you get one) so even people without fancy-pants RSS readers could use it.

I never got why MT, WordPress, etc don't include the comment feeds though, since they seem intent on including everything else. *shrug*

Yep, I noticed late last night that adding [slash:comments] allows to view comments in RSS Bandit. Gotta add this to my feed.

Yep, works great now. Thanks a lot, this is one of my favorite sites!

All of a sudden even my Omea Reader shows the number of comments! For some reason I had to remove the feed and then subscribe again. Weird, but it worked.

All of a sudden even my Omea Reader shows the number of comments! For some reason I had to remove the feed and then subscribe again. Weird, but it worked.