This is

as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

. Here I write about many things. In the past I wrote about other things but the past is past. I write code for people to play with, I write about my life on Twitter, and I write here.

On I wrote Following comment threads, on the subject of JavaScript and the DOM and Usability.

It really massively annoys me when I post a comment to someone's site and then have to keep checking back to see if anyone's followed it up. Now, I'm aware of coComment but I don't like it much; people have to sign up for it, for a start, and that's just one more place to sign up for. (This might be helped with OpenID or something, but whatever.) So all my comment forms now have a "Post comment and follow comments in your feed reader" button as well as the normal Post Comment button. Write a comment and click that and it will post your comment and then take you to a page where you can choose your feed reader; you'll then have any further comments on that post appear in your reader when they happen. The thing that chooses your feed reader is Aquarion's SubscribeMe, so I don't have to do the heavy lifting in finding out how to throw you a feed in such a way as to make it appear in your reader. It's all done with JavaScript, not surprisingly. At the moment the script is pretty specific to my comments pages, but I plan to make it a bit more generic so that you can just pick it up and add it to your comments pages to get the same feature for your site. Make it easier for your commenters to follow along with a comment thread. (For those of you who really want it now, it's available. It requires JQuery and the JQuery form plugin at the moment, although the final version won't. To adapt it for your site, you'll need to change subsc.FEED_READER_URL to make it construct the URL for the RSS feed for comments for the post you're on, and also change inps[i].value == 'Submit Comment' so that it finds your existing submit button. If that didn't make a lot of sense to you then I advise you to wait until I release a more generic version.) Let me know if there's a problem with it. You might also want to let Aquarion know if your feed reader isn't supported, or you can tell me if you prefer.
Alvy

Something similar is http://co.mment.com/ that has a bookmarklet you can use for following different comments threads on different pages. It generates an RSS feed for all of them. I have been using it for months and it's really great.

Alvy

Sorry, the right URL is http://co.mments.com/

sil

Alvy: I didn't know about that. Looks like a good service; I'm trying it out!

Phil Wilson

People don't *always* have to sign up for it. They have a reasonable crawler which monitors blogs and picks up new posts, even if the poster is unregistered on cocomments.

sil

Phil: aha, didn't realise that cocomments didn't require signup either. Clever.

sil

Actually, there seems to be a bit of a trend for not requiring signups. I'm highly in favour of this. Let's see more of that, and more openID auth to this sort of thing.

Simon Willison

Testing... and I can edit

sil

testing from me (and I can edit too)

sil

more testing from me

sil

and more.

sil

and yet more

sil

speak

sil

fibble

bibble

bob

cheap coach monster

[removed as spam]

cheap Ugg Monster

[removed as spam]

This website belongs to Stuart Langridge. Contact details are available. Don't eat yellow snow. Valid HTML5, at least in theory, except for the bits that aren't because I'm that futuristic that I'm ahead of the spec, oh yes. HTML5 help from Bruce Lawson, among others. Fonts from the superb FontSquirrel. End.