When I switched co.mments to use the new feeds about a week ago, I made a mistake. As far as I know, it only affects Bloglines users (kwc was first to report it). Even if a conversation had no new comments, Bloglines would still mark it as updated.

Since Bloglines checks the feeds automatically, I couldn’t test it fast enough. I had to make a change, wait a few hours for Bloglines to check the feed again, test the results, try something else, etc. So it took a while, but I finally fixed it.

Unfortunately, due to that problem (and its fix), all your conversations may show up as unread the next time you check Bloglines. This will happen only once, and then things will go back to normal. I apologize for that.

Technical Details

Read this is you want to know the gory technical details.
When Blogline (or any feed reader) asks the co.mments server for an update, it receives a feed that is generated to show all the last updates. If there are new comments since last checked, the feed will include recently updated conversations that show these new comments, but also conversations (and comments) you’ve seen before.

Why repeat the same content? All feeds do that and feed readers are designed to deal with that. It means that if your feed reader stops working, the data in your feed is not lost. It also lets you use more than one feed reader, or share your feeds with other people.

The feed readers I use for testing co.mments ignore old items. If they get a feed with the same item (and most feeds include older items), they simply ignore them and only display the new ones.

Bloglines is a bit smarter, it actually looks at the contents of the item. If it sees that the item has the same name, but the content changed, it marks that item as new.

Each feed tells you when the conversation was last updated and used to do it with relatives times (e.g. “3 hours ago”). Each time Bloglines reads the feed it gets slightly different content. Three hours later, it would say “6 hours ago”. Bloglines consider this an update and marks the feed item as unread.

I fixed that by changing all times to absolute, instead of “3 hours ago” the feed will say “Apr 30, 2006 7pm”. And on the next check it will still show the same time. Bloglines will consider it the same item and won’t mark it as unread.

Since I’ve changed all items in the feed from relative to absolute times, Bloglines will consider every item in your feed to be an update and mark the entire feed as unread. But only once, the next time it checks the feed. Afterwards, it will only mark new items as unread.

I just added keyboard shortcuts to co.mments, so if you prefer to use keyboard over mouse, here’s another way to use your tracking page.

You can use j and k to move to the next and previous conversations. If you’re using GMail or Bloglines, you’re already familiar with these shortcuts.

Use o to open and see comments from the conversation, o again to close it. Click return to go the blog post, and in combination with shift to open in a new window.

You can see a list of all keyboard shortcuts here.

Sociable

If you’re a WordPress user, check out Sociable. It’s a plugin that adds links to all the social sites.

Social bookmarking sites allow websurfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online.

The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

Thanks to Chris Kasten it now includes co.mments.

Another must-read from Anil Dash:

1. Skim just enough of the first few sentences so you can get a fair idea what the topic of a post or news item is.
2. Scroll quickly, as fast as you can! Be careful not to accidentally read any of the other comments on the page on the way down. (Some of them may contain the information you’re about to post.)
3. Type out whatever opinion you’ve had on this topic your entire life. Don’t waste time with spelling or punctuation, and be careful not to let any new information on the page influence your thoughts.

And do (at least this once) scroll down, there’s a few more gems in the comments.

_{Via Jeremy Zawodny’s linkblog}

Assaf hat mich gebeten, selber über meine Übersetzung der FeedBurner FeedFlare zu schreiben, was ich hiermit dankend annehme. Eine Erklärung, was eine FeedFlare ist und ein Tutorial, um eigene FeedFlares zu erstellen, findet könnt ihr hier finden.
Um die co.mments-FeedFlare für euren Feed zu nutzen, geht wie folgt vor:

1. Wählt euren Feed aus und klickt auf Optimize
2. Klickt Menü links auf FeedFlares
3. Falls ihr FeedFlares noch nicht aktiviert habt, klickt ihr unten auf der Seite auf Activate
4. Gebt im Feld unter den Flares http://www.rainonline.ws/feedflares/wpmitcommentsverfolgen.xml ein und klickt auf Add New Flare
5. Speichert eure Einstellungen unten auf der Seite ab und ihr seid fertig!

Wenn ihr euch jetzt noch über die anderen FeedFlares auf Deutsch wundert, könnt ihr noch diesen Beitrag ansehen.

I promised a site redesign, and I’m sure you noticed it’s not there yet. Here’s a short explanation of what’s going on.

I made a list of all the features you asked for. The feeds not always working as expected, new comments are hard to see on the tracking page, and past 20 or so conversations, the tracking page is hard to use. And not surprisingly, people have been asking for tags, and other ways to organize stuff.

I realized that there’s a lot in common to these problems, and it’s easier to come up with one solution that will address them, and make it easier to add more features in the future. It turns out that solution requires some significant changes to the way conversations are retrieved from the database, a change that could easily take a couple of weeks to develop and test.

So I’m working on that. Meanwhile, I’ve also switched my development machine from Windows to Linux. It’s easier to develop the code, test it and deploy it using the same setup as the server. So a few days spent setting up Linux, copying files from one computer to another, getting comfortable with the new machine.

Linux may be great for development, but the hardware support is a bit lacking. So I had to work around issues with the video driver, flakey wifi card and suspend/resume problems. Most of it fixed by now.

So I apologize for the delay, I’m definitely working on these new features, I just need a bit more time.