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Track comments via RSS

July 31st, 2003 | Web related

_(Disclaimer: this is written by someone who knows nothing about RSS!)_

RSS aggregators are great, but there needs to be some more advanced method of tracking the comments made. Comments are half the attraction of weblogs, and so for many posts I read in the aggregator, I still have to visit the website to see if there are any new comments/read the comments. This wastes my time, and the bandwidth of the weblog.

So what could be done? Well, the easiest solution would be to have a comments tag with each story, and store the number of comments there. That gives me an easy way of seeing if new comments have been posted. It won’t stop me having to visit the weblog if there are new comments, but at least it’ll save wasted trips.

4 comments ↓

#1 Neil T. on 07.31.03 at 7:00 pm

I might just be able to help you there :).

Firstly, you’ll need to start using your RSS 2.0 feed as you default (currently it’s the RSS 1.0 feed, and I’m not sure if you can do it with that. I may be wrong). Now, log into Movable Type, and open the edit screen for the RSS 2.0 template.

Before the ‘</item>’ line, add the following:

<MTEntryIfAllowComments>
<comments><$MTEntryPermalink$>#comments</comments>
</MTEntryIfAllowComments>

That will add a link to the comments area for every post. You can take this further by including the Slash namespace - this allows you to include the number of comments as well. To do that, modify the second line of the file to read:

<rss version=”2.0″
xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/”
xmlns:sy=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/”
xmlns:admin=”http://webns.net/mvcb/”
xmlns:rdf=”http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#”
xmlns:slash=”http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/”>

Then, in the code you added before, add this before the closing MTEntryIfAllowComments tag:

<slash:comments><MTEntryCommentCount></slash:comments>

This is certainly supported by SharpReader (www.sharpreader.net) and probably a few other newsreaders.

#2 Peter Bowyer on 08.05.03 at 9:44 am

Thanks Neil, I’ll try that later on today. Look forward to more sites doing this and more readers supporting it :-)

#3 Peter Bowyer on 08.06.03 at 11:08 pm

Where is the setting to change the default feed to RSS 2.0?

Thanks :-)

#4 Sudar on 09.18.05 at 12:06 pm

Thanks. I was looking for something like this for long time. Came here through Google search.

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