Comment RSS feed
The other day, I reminded myself that I liked the idea of an RSS comment feed, so that you wouldn’t have to keep checking back to see whether someone had replied to your comment on someone else’s blog. Today I followed a link from scripting.com about namespaces in RSS 0.9x (okay, I don’t really have a clue what it means, but it worked out), and while looking around Bill Kearney’s blog at syndic8, discovered that he had posted a template to produce an RSS feed from Movable Type comments. I dearly love it when someone else does the work for me.
I did made a few changes for my RSS comment feed, detailed below (or inside, or further: how do you describe where the extended entry lives?).
A few things I changed from Bill’s template:
- For the channel title, I added ” : Comments” after <$MTBlogName$>, because when I first added my feed to Amphetadesk, I confused myself with two feeds with the same name.
- In the individual items, I removed the comment author’s email address from the title element, because I try to be as careful as possible with your email addresses, and that just seems too risky, for too little benefit
- Also, rather than use the MTCommentAuthorLink in the item link element, I constructed comment permalinks (by adding <a name=”<$MTCommentID pad=”1″$>”></a> just before <$MTCommentBody$>, and then turning the comment date into a permalink with <a href=”<$MTBlogArchiveURL$><$MTCommentEntryID pad=”1″$>.php#<$MTCommentID pad=”1″$>”><$MTCommentDate$></a> [and yes, I am embarrassed by that ugly method for constructing the individual archive filename, but nothing else seems to work in comment context]), and pointed the link element at them, since that not only lets the reader get to the comment author’s email/URL, but also lets her see the comment in context and reply
So, there you go: if you run an RSS aggregator, and you want to follow the most interesting (and most frequently posted) part of my blog, the feed is available at comments.xml, and if you want your own feed in my style rather than Bill’s, here’s the template:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!-- generator="MovableType/2.11" -->
<rss version="0.91">
<channel>
<title><$MTBlogName$> : Comments</title>
<link><$MTBlogURL$></link>
<description><$MTBlogDescription$></description>
<language>en-us</language>
<MTComments lastn="20">
<item>
<title><$MTCommentAuthor encode_html="1"$>
<$MTCommentEmail encode_html="1"$></title>
<description><$MTCommentBody encode_html="1"$></description>
<link><$MTCommentAuthorLink encode_html="1"$></link>
</item>
</MTComments>
</channel>
</rss>
Supergroovy, I think. All this feedystuff kinda boggles me a bit. Anyway, I’m off to make a new comments feed thingo now for the ’bottle, in hopes that someone’ll use it…
”over yonder…”
Wait a tick. So this displays the last 20 comments no matter which entry they were posted on, right? Hmm, I don’t know id that’s any good. The signal vs noise ration would probably be extremely low for my site. Maybe with customizable fields in MT in the next versions there might be a way to selectively create RSS feeds for individual entries that produce interresting discussions.
Well, it’s not conditional, it’s every single post, but I’m about to post instructions for generating an RSS feed for individual posts and their comments as soon as I test it with this comment.
I’m not sure I buy the idea of only creating a feed for interesting discussions, though, since in my experience any entry that someone comments on is an interesting discussion to them. Since you don’t know what entry will produce someone’s first-ever comment on a weblog post, which they will then check for replies a dozen times a day, I think it’s better to just create a feed for every post, and let your readers decide what is and isn’t interesting.
Would be interesteing to share your template. I see the permalink to the comment is correctly
(I added your comments xml feed in my syndication page as a testfeed)
http://www.aroundmyroom.com/syndicate
It’s working much better than the 404 error I get
Found it .. :-)
Yeah, Phil, you’re probably right. It always amazes me what my readers find interresting. Most of the time it’s posts that take me about 5 seconds to write and the ones I deem the most interresting because I put a lot of time into them seldomly create a lively discussion.
OT: Your ”Remember Info” doesn’t work…
Thanks so much! I implemented this so I can keep track of my comments via the RSS reader in Googledesktop :)
Summarizing the Simple Solution to Comment Tracking and Monitoring.
This is a summary-so-far and for posterity to a on-again-off-again discussion that he been on going for nearly a year — comment tracking and monitoring. The bottom line is there is no need for a new web app and it doesn’t have to be that difficult.
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