SubscribeWhat’s new
The tracking page shows new comments at the top. Gone are the days of scrolling down to see new comments — posts with new comments will always show up at the top of the list. And since it’s now easier to track a lot of conversations, the tracking page makes that easier by adding navigation to older and recent posts. Look for the navigation links at the bottom of the page.
You’ll also notice that the main conversations page and its feed have the same functionality as the tracking page. Check it out, there’s a lot of interesting conversations added throughout the day.
If you’re tracking conversations in languages other than English, more good news. Conversations will now show up with longer title and longer posts.
And as always, a few minor improvements, like getting rid of the scrollbars that show in Safari, making it possible to use co.mments even if you’ve disabled JavaScript, and a new layout that shows more conversations in a single page.
Posted by Assaf in Announcements, scrapi on Thursday, April 20th, 2006. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Chris
April 20th, 2006 at 8:34 am
Great additions. Unfortunately there seemws to be a bug preventing the clearing of read comments. They cleat when you press the clear button but if you reload the page they’re right back again as before.
Also it doesn’t seem like comments are being picked up right now. There were 7 comments in one of the thread I was looking at last night. There are still only seven on co.mments now even though manually checking the source website I can see that there are 19 comments.
Assaf
April 20th, 2006 at 9:28 am
I just fixed the clear comment count.
I’m also checking on the conversations, it seems that it didn’t catch a lot of those during the night, so fixing that as well.
Chris
April 20th, 2006 at 12:28 pm
Assaf - My threads are now updating but the Clear button is still not functioning properly for me.
Also the bookmarklet is now transparent (except for the text) making it difficult to read when it pops up.
Assaf
April 20th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
One of those days when the software seems to have a mind of its own
Bookmarklet now gets the right color, and the clear button should work as expected.
Chris
April 20th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Great - It’s working as expected now. Thanks for the nice update.
Assaf
April 20th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
And thanks for all your help.
splintor
April 23rd, 2006 at 12:55 pm
Is this the right place for suggestion?
I’ll assume it is.
It would be nice if you could collect Joel on Software discussions as conversations, see for example http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.333912
In addition, two minor comments:
When you try to add a conversation, and fail, the dialog has a “close” link, but when you hover over it (at least in FF 1.5), the cursor is not changed, so you are not sure it is working. The cursor to change so it will behave like a normal link.
In addition, it would be nice if this failure dialog will have an option to report this to you, so you can consider adding it to your list of supported sites/platforms.
Regards,
Splintor
Assaf
April 23rd, 2006 at 7:20 pm
I’m working on some improvements to the comment tracker. Looks like it will work with Joel on Software, but I can’t confirm yet. Anyway, I’m adding this to the list of sites to check.
I’ll see why the link doesn’t work well in FF. I use FF myself, I guess I just never noticed that.
And great suggestion about “report this site”.
kwc
April 24th, 2006 at 8:27 pm
Thanks for the update — I’m becoming more and more dependent on co.mments. I’ve noticed now, though, that subscriptions that I’ve added since the update keep appearing as new in Bloglines. Not sure if this is a Bloglines or co.comments issue. It wouldn’t bother me so much if I were less dependent than I am now :).
kwc
April 24th, 2006 at 8:29 pm
I should clarify that it is Bloglines that thinks the entry about new comments is new — if I login to co.mments it is correctly showing zero new comments.
Assaf
April 25th, 2006 at 12:02 am
I’m not exactly sure why bloglines is doing that, so I’m going to test a bit and figure out a fix. I think they just handle the feeds differently, and probably better than any of the other feed readers I use for testing.
About the dependency … I suggest staying away for this blog, because there’s a few more cool features coming up.
Assaf
April 28th, 2006 at 4:53 pm
@kwc
I finally figured out the problem with BlogLines. They way they detect if a feed item was updated is by looking at the content, instead of the publication date.
Since the feed shows the last comment in relative time (e.g. 3 hours ago), when Bloglines get the same feed again, the content it different (e.g. 6 hours ago), even though there are no new comments.
Fix coming soon.
kwc
April 29th, 2006 at 10:01 am
Thanks Assaf!
splintor
April 29th, 2006 at 10:59 pm
BTW, Assaf, please let us know how you fixed it
Assaf
April 29th, 2006 at 11:08 pm
I simply changed the feed to show the date/time when the last comment was found. So instead of saying “3 hours ago” it will say “Apr 29 7pm”.
That way, when Bloglines pulls the feed later on the item has the exact same content, and Bloglines doesn’t mark it as updated.