I’ve blogged for a few years now, and over the time period I’ve tried a variety of methods of keeping track of comments I’ve left on other sites. I’ve tried bookmarking them in del.icio.us as well as some comment services such as coComment. I found that I either failed to follow up (bookmarks) or ran into flaky technical issues with services (coComment). As I’ve moved more and more of my information-gathering into RSS (I use Google Reader), a couple months ago I had a duh moment. Use comment feeds, you dummy!
WordPress offers comment feeds “out of the box” and many other blogging platforms have it as an option. When I see a post that has (or is likely to have) interesting comments, I simply subscribe to the comment feed using Google Reader. I’ve setup a label (tag) in Google Reader for comments, so it’s easy to go directly to the comments if I desire. Comments are short-lived, but I don’t worry about constantly cleaning things up, since every few months I’ll look at the Google Reader Trends page to find stale feeds for removal and the comment feeds can be removed at that time.
The only downside is that there are still some blogs I follow that don’t offer comment feeds (I’m looking at you, Metroblogging Portland) so there are cases where this isn’t a perfect solution.
[tags]comments, blogging, commentfeeds, rss, googlereader[/tags]
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi,
I understand you faced some technical issues with our extension some time ago (after your post, this was fixed).
But do you also know that we offer RSS feeds as well ?
If you track a conversations, update will automatically be published in your coComment feed. No need to clean things up: just a single feed.
We are tracking coComment on platforms that do not offer an RSS feed for comments as well.
I hope that helps
Hey Aaron,
Great geeks think/act alike. I do pretty much the same thing you do.
I combine the force of ‘subscribe to this post’s comment’ RSS and coComment. I agree with you about coComment, I’ve given it a fair amount of time and chances, but it is till buggy and slow. But it is still useful for me, like you said, some sites still don’t have comment RSS, so I use coComment and then I subscribe to my own coComment’s comment section RSS.
I think comment follow-up continues to be a pain point for many bloggers as we can see from your post. I’m sure you’ve heard or seen, but Disqus.com seems to be gaining traction on a few blogs I read.
Now I’m gonna go and click on that little orange thing up there “RSS 2.0 feed for these comments” and put it into my GR’s “abc-comment” tag/folder. I use “abc” to sort my many folders so it would show up on top, yeah, that was before they put in the drag’n'drop cool feature.
Later…
I remember looking at coComment and a few also-rans some time in the past year, but found that none of them did what I needed. In particular, every comment-tracking system out there failed because it only worked with a few set blogging systems. Either I can only follow comments on blogs with comment feeds, or I can only follow comments on blogs using these 3 platforms. Maybe it’s just me, but I seem to follow conversations that fit neither system.
Which is why, being the dork I am, I built my own dang comment-counting screen scraper. I suppose I could have it spit out an RSS feed as well, but the Web page I use as an interface to my comment tracker has some functionality built into it that I prefer over an RSS form.
What’s surprising to me was how easy it was to build the comment tracker. At its heart, its a cron job with about 10 different regular expression matches in it. And I can follow comments just about anywhere, as long as I can find a unique regex for its comments.
So that was my solution.