The usefulness of a syndication feed of your blog's comments

July 24, 2009

One of the accidental smart decisions that I made when I was writing DWiki's code for syndication feeds was that I should create syndication feeds for comments as well as entries. (This built on an earlier decision that I should have some way of getting a list of comments in chronological order, just as I had one for the standard wiki 'recently edited pages' feature.)

It isn't that I think this is an important feature to offer other people; as far as I know, none of the visitors to WanderingThoughts have ever paid it any attention. Instead, it (and the equivalent actual page) have turned out to be very handy for me, because it has two very useful effects. First and most obviously, it means that I can easily see all new comments to anything, anywhere, even if the entry is an old one. This is handy for more than the spam patrol, since every so often real people leave useful comments on old entries.

(It also drastically reduces any temptation to close old entries to comments, the way that some blog systems do.)

Second, I can shove the syndication feed into a feed reader and use all of the features to keep track of comments that need replies when I have the time and energy, or that I want to read carefully (or read what they've pointed me to carefully). This throughly beats all the alternate methods of keeping track of this stuff; if I had to do it by hand, I probably wouldn't do it at all.

(Of course, this doesn't mean that I actually write replies. As some people may have noticed, I'm generally terrible at writing comment replies that require substantive amounts of thought and effort, partly because of limited time.)


Comments on this page:

From 203.144.10.102 at 2009-07-24 03:00:23:

I've actually subscribed to a few of your comment feeds. I have a folder for them in NetNewsWire. An inspection of your Apache logs might show more than you'd expect.

I find it rather annoying when comment feeds aren't available.

- Jason Weathered

By cks at 2009-07-24 12:44:19:

Whoops, I was unclear here (because it was oh so clear in my own head, as it always is): I wasn't talking about the per-entry comment feeds, which are a fairly broadly supported blog feature these days. WanderingThoughts also has overall comment feeds that contains comments on any/all entries; my impression is that this is much less common in blog software.

(There are a bunch of such feeds, not just one, because the whole blog stuff here is just an overlay on a general wiki-oid directory structure, so anywhere there is a directory there is a comment syndication feed for things in that directory. This can be a lot of directories.)

From 203.144.24.214 at 2009-07-25 05:09:39:

Ah right, my bad. I misinterpreted and/or skimmed a bit too much.

I have stumbled over this global comment feed in the past and have almost subscribed to it a few times. There's actually not many of your posts where I'm not interested in the replies. After reviewing it again just now, the signal-to-noise ratio is quite good and I have just added it to my feed reader.

- Jason Weathered

By cks at 2009-07-26 01:40:48:

I have to confess that the global comment feed(s) are not the most usable things in the world, since they have very little context (and, eg, don't explicitly include any links to the original entry they're a comment on, although their master URL takes you to the overall entry+comment page).

This is acceptable for me, since I'm really familiar with the content here for the obvious reason, but not necessarily so easy for other people.

Written on 24 July 2009.
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Last modified: Fri Jul 24 00:22:52 2009
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