January 06, 2005

Feeding Frenzy

Blog comment threads suck. Mostly, they suck because once you've moved on and are reading other posts, there's no way of knowing if your comment has been responded to, and hence of knowing whether or not you want to go back and continue the discussion. It'd be nice if you could subscribe to the comments on a blog, just as you subscribe to the entries with your favourite RSS aggregator

As an experiment, then, I've set up various XML feeds of the comments on this blog. There's an RSS 1.0 feed of all comments across all entries, and an RSS 2.0 feed of the comments for each individual entry — if you go to the entry page there's a link to the feed above the comments section, and as soon as I frob the templates after posting this, it'll be in a <link /> element, so all those subscribe bookmarklets/widgets should work nicely.

[Update: here's the feed for this entry]

Feedback on their usefulness and their brokenness, and on their lack of these things, is very much appreciated! Also, would people reading this through Planet #nott be interested in comment feeds for the blogs on there being syndicated there, as well as blog entries? I don't expect to use it much either way, so I'm interested in opinions.

Posted by James at 01:30 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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