Following comment threads

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.

13 Responses to “Following comment threads”

  1. 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
  2. Sorry, the right URL is http://co.mments.com/

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

    sil
  4. 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.

    Phil Wilson
  5. Phil: aha, didn’t realise that cocomments didn’t require signup either. Clever.

    sil
  6. 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.

    sil
  7. Testing… and I can edit

    Simon Willison
  8. testing from me (and I can edit too)

    sil
  9. more testing from me

    sil
  10. and more.

    sil
  11. and yet more

    sil
  12. speak

    sil
  13. fibble
    bibble
    bob

    sil

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