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Shel Holtz
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Comments in RSS

One of the arguments against full-text RSS feeds is that you can’t see any comments. With partial-text feeds, you need to go to the blog to finish reading what you’ve started, and that’s where you’ll find comments. If you can read the entire entry, the argument goes, you’ll have no incentive to visit the blog and thus the comments will go unread.

It’s a moot point now, at least for this blog. After several fits and starts with my templates, I’ve made the adjustment to deliver comments in my full-text feed. I’m sure it’s working in RSS 2.0, in any case.

You still need to visit the blog in order to add your own comment, but I suspect some enterprising aggregator author will figure that one out soon.

07/06/05 | 14 Comments | Comments in RSS

Comments

  • 1.Hey tiger!

    This 'comments-in-feed' technology is fabulous! Bravo!

    Now, I await blogger introducing it into their feed technology (atom, I think...)

    Lee

    Lee Hopkins | July 2005 | Adelaide, Australia

  • 2.Hi Shel,
    this is way cool to read in NetNewsWire. The obvious question though, will the post be republished each time a comment is added?
    Best
    Sebastian

    Sebastian | July 2005 | Hamburg, Germany

  • 3.Good question, Sebastian. Only one way to find out!

    Shel Holtz | July 2005 | Concord, CA

  • 4.Shel Holtz has introduced a new feature on his weblog, comments in the RSS-feed. I think this is a major breakthrough for conversations, because very often a post comes alive in the comments. It seems like his posts are republished

    http://critic.typepad.com/planetsab/2005/07/cool_n | July 2005

  • 5.And it gets republished when a trackback is sent as well!

    Sebastian | July 2005 | Hamburg, Germany

  • 6.James Farmer over at http://incsub.org uses a different method. He lets you subscribe to email updates of comments you subscribe to. You do that too. That really promotes a conversation.

    This method has also started a conversation of sorts, but I find it kind of irritating. Is each comment really adding that much value to the average reader?

    Bud Gibson | July 2005 | Ann Arbor, MI

  • 7.Well, I use Great News as my reader and I don't get the feed republishing itself with each new comment or trackback.

    For example, whilst you posted your comment, Bud, it didn't show up in my feed reader as a new post for the whole conversation. The only new post Great News picked up was Shel's post about Skype for Outlook.

    The only way I found that you had commented, Bud, was because I was sent an auto-email.

    I love being able to read all the comments as well as the original post, now matter how short or long those comments are -- definately a user-interface improvement as far as I am concerned.

    Lee | July 2005 | Adelaide, Australia

  • 8.Ahhh, but Bloglines refreshes the whole conversation and blog - so that, for instance, my previous comment has now put this post back at the top of the list of 31 new items for this blog.

    Score one point for GreatNews...

    Lee Hopkins | July 2005 | Adelaide, Australia

  • 9.Lee, I suspect that's all based on the adjustments I made to the RSS template that BlogLines is picking up, right? BlogLines wasn't getting comments before I did that, were they?

    Shel Holtz | July 2005 | Concord, CA

  • 10.Arrgghh!!! Now, this is where we enter into a discussion about the correlation between age and senile dementia...

    Hand on heart I cannot categorically say "No they didn't appear", but it's been a couple of days since I last checked bloglines so they may have...

    However, I have just refreshed my bloglines list so nothing new currently appears for your blog. I'll let you know what happens when I refresh the list again in a few minutes time...

    Lee Hopkins | July 2005 | Adelaide, Australia

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