Comment me do
Please comment on this post. My previous attempts at comments rss seemed sluggish to appear in feed readers if they did at all. I guessed this was because my makeshift rss feed lacked guids. I have rectified this, which was fun. So please comment so I can see what happens. For once, a moderate quantity of spam wouldn't be totally unwelcome.
You can even follow along by subscribing to the comments feed and tell me when nothing happens.
A.D. VII ID. FEB. MMVII
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RSS feeds for Blosxom writeback-based comments on Aurlog (at least for individual posts)
After finding some of Sil's RSS feeds for comments on particular posts extremely useful and galvanised by his recent comments that
It really massively annoys me when I post a comment to someone's site and then have to keep checking back to see if anyone's followed it up
I decided to do something about it. Sil mentions co.mments which sadly doesn't work for Blosxom weblogs, definitely not those using the now rather dated writeback plugin as mine does. I also don't like the idea of using what is essentially another aggregator if, for example, I wanted to monitor one of my own posts. I wouldn't want anyone else to have to either, although having tried co.mments out on a few other sites I think it is very good.
In the true spirit of Perl-based Blosxom, the script that produces the comments RSS is written in PHP. This was originally obvious until I discovered Google Reader doesn't like .php on the end of the RSS feeds (Bloglines, which I use, doesn't care either way and I haven't checked any others). Anyway, this is no longer a problem. I have also included a Subscribe link which, like the one on the left for the weblog as a whole, uses Aquarion's SubscribeMe service. It doesn't yet use Sil's idea implementing one button for submitting a comment and subscribing to a feed, although I shall review that when he releases his promised generic version.
I haven't yet thought of a way to produce an RSS feed for all comments but am not sure I'm really bothered anyway. It would generally get bogged down in spam, this not being a high traffic site for comments and would be hideous to produce with writeback's data structure, lack of timestamping, and lack of unique identifiers for individual comments. I could (further) hack the writeback plugin, as I have already done to implement spam filtering, but then I wouldn't have time to write needlessly long posts such as this one.
Do, gently, let me know of the inevitable problems I have missed.
A.D. XV KAL. FEB. MMVII
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Tom