SubscribeBlog Support: What’s Working, What’s Coming Up
Many of you asked what blogs are currently supported by co.mments. Right now the list includes WordPress, Blogger and recent versions of MoveableType. I’m also tracking posts from Typo and TextPattern, and Flickr photo comments work.
It would be easy to put a full list on the Wiki, but I want your help with that, so I’m going to start here.
Let’s put up a list of blogs that do work, but also what you want me to support. That way I’ll know what to work on next.
Here’s the current list of blogs (and other sources) I have, part from the Wiki part from e-mails I received:
Blogger (*)
Digg.com (*)
Flickr (*)
MoveableType/TypePad (*)
MediaWiki-based Wikis (perhaps at least the “My watchlist” page)
MetaFilter (*)
MySpace
LiveJournal
PunBB powered forum thread
SourceForge discussion forum
Textpattern
Vox
WordPress (*)
Yahoo 360
(*) Currently working.
Posted by Assaf in General on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Library clips :: Managing and tracking comments :: May :: 2006
May 4th, 2006 at 2:21 am
[…] Problem is that co.mments only supports a handful of blog and other services, it can only track comments for services it supports. […]
Jarkko Kniivilä
May 6th, 2006 at 12:54 am
I added the following personal wish to the wiki article (http://wiki.co.mments.com/FeatureRequests):
“Blojsom-based weblogs, as exemplified by Simpy Chichimichi, the Simpy.com community blog”.
Then I backlinked from the article to this entry so that people don’t miss the discussion here. Hope I didn’t step on your toes there, Assaf …
I’m sorry, I’m confused. Am I to understand that the above lists those platforms and services which are *not* yet supported? It can’t be the other way around, or can it?
Assaf
May 6th, 2006 at 5:21 pm
Good idea to link back from the Wiki, and thanks for doing that
What I want to do is list all the blogs/services that people want to see, so I can include as many as I can in the next release. I’m working on improving the engine right now, and I’d like to include as many of these as I can.
So the list includes those that are currently working (as in: Assaf, don’t break these!), those that are not working, and those that need to be fixed. Right now you can tell when someone comments on a Yahoo 360 blog, but you can’t see the comment text.
Those are all the blogs/services I’m going to test the engine against, and later on report to you what works, and keep working on the ones that don’t.
Assaf
May 7th, 2006 at 12:03 am
Also worth mentioning:
HaloScan(*)
Xanga(*)
(* for showing up comments)
Simone Carletti
May 7th, 2006 at 9:53 am
Drupal ( http://www.drupal.org/ )
Serendipity ( http://www.s9y.org/ )
dBlog ( http://www.dblog.it/ ) - Popular Italian blog platform
Talking about new features I was wondering if a new feature will be able to track “my comments” telling me my last comments.
Simone Carletti’s Blog
May 7th, 2006 at 9:55 am
co.mments: lista dei blog supportati. Chi manca all’appello?…
Assaf in un intervento sul blog di co.mments riepiloga le piattaforme ufficialmente supportate. Chi manca all’appello?…
Assaf
May 7th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
I just picked the ’summer or code’ post from Durpal.org, tracked it and it works. The Serendipity blog (blog.s9y.org) also works.
dBlog doesn’t work yet, so I’m adding it to the list.
The new engine will collect more data on comments, including a way to see all comments attributed to you.
Simone Carletti
May 7th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
Great!
Please, think about providing a feed for user’s comment.
Marlenek
May 8th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Hi there, thaks to Simone Carletti to mention dBlog platform. You can find a Co.mments plug-in for dBlog 2.0 in our community and “laboratory” page here: http://www.dblog.it/sito/laboratorio.asp . Thanks
Jeff
May 15th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Would love to know how and when Typepad support is coming? Or is it already supported?
I use Advanced Templates there…
Assaf
May 15th, 2006 at 11:12 am
Jeff, I tested a few typepad blogs and it works fine.
Hermann Klinke
May 21st, 2006 at 12:10 am
ajaxian.com does not work.
Assaf
May 21st, 2006 at 1:52 pm
Ajaxian sort of works. It tracks the number of comments correctly, but the contents are off by one. Has to do with their interpretation of the HTML spec.
Hermann Klinke
May 22nd, 2006 at 1:17 am
It shows “0 in conversation” for http://ajaxian.com/archives/google-web-toolkit-the-correct-level-of-abstraction#comments
Assaf
May 22nd, 2006 at 9:59 am
That’s weird, I’m seeing 18 comments from that post.
Zoli’s Blog
May 27th, 2006 at 8:45 am
Zoho - the “Safer Office”…
It’s somewhat ironic that in the very days I’ve just written about Duet, the joint SAP-Microsoft product, I am seriously thinking of escaping from Microsoft-prison, and switching to the most promising WebOffice (Office 2.0) suite. Perhaps…
splintor
May 28th, 2006 at 3:27 am
Do you know why comments are not supported on ecmanaut blogger blog,
e.g. on http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/05/pimp-my-site.html?
Assaf
May 28th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
splintor,
I’m not sure why it doesn’t work, yet. I’m working on fixing it, thanks for letting me know.
Andi
June 15th, 2006 at 11:15 am
While trying to make co.mments.com work with as many comment systems as possible is a good idea you can never win this race. Comment systems are so simple that nearly every web application has them and each implements it in is own way.
Here is what you should do: Join the efforts to create a microformat for comments or simply support all the proposals mentioned on the linked page. Document the formats you support in the Wiki (make sure to link it prominently). Then users can ask the developers of their tool of choice to implement the microformat and co.mments will automatically support them.
It’s really simple and I know at least one developer who would adopt this new microformat instantly (me).
Assaf
June 16th, 2006 at 2:40 am
Andi, I’m a big advocate of microformats and one of the early adopters. I love the simplicity and the way it meshes with the Web.
You can check more of my work on microformats on my personal blog at http://labnotes.org.
R. Francis Smith
June 30th, 2006 at 10:17 pm
Notable to me by its lack of mention is Livejournal; I’ve been a user there for years and it has driven me mad what a hassle it is to follow later comments on an article as it ages, so I would surely love to see that supported (at least for unlocked posts.)
There’s also the comments and/or feedback plugins for blosxom blogs, but…
Assaf
June 30th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
I’m adding LiveJournal to the list, and also Vox.
R. Francis Smith
June 30th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Vox was going to be my next question, as I recently got a standard account there.
Somewhat beside the point, I just had a funny moment where I thought “wow, I really need to keep up with the comments on this post.” Yeah, if only there were a web site for that purpose!
Assaf
June 30th, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Welcome to co.mments
Slava Frid
November 6th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Configuration for blogging seems to have a limitation on the # of characters allowed in the URL, thus someone with a long URL is unable to configure the tools properly. In my case, I have a deep directory structure to get to the post.php (in Wordpress) and am thus out of luck.
Curious Stranger
January 10th, 2007 at 11:43 am
Is Flickr comment tracking working? I recently tried tracking the conversation here, but the Firefox co.mments bookmarklet said it couldn’t find comments to track.
Assaf
January 10th, 2007 at 11:59 am
co.mments works with Flickr photos, but not groups or forums. I’m looking at adding both.
Brandon D. Valentine
June 3rd, 2007 at 12:28 pm
MySpace blog support would be a huge boon. MySpace offers no form of comment tracking whatsoever and that makes tracking conversations from people who insist on using that broken platform maddening.
Thanks for a great product!
Assaf
June 5th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
I know, but MySpace is incredibly difficult to track, even for co.mments.
Gerry
August 12th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
Stage6.com works, but Buzka.com doesn’t
I think it would be better if you created some sort of standard that people could use on their sites to make it work no matter what. or perhaps they could add a specially named XML feed for their comments, which followed a common standard. There are also those what are they called again… ummmm… microformats.
If you were clear about what you wanted somewhere on your site, then developers could fix their comments systems so that they were in a format that was appropriate for you. This is a great service and it make a lot of sense so I’m sure they would be willing to do so.
Gerry
August 12th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Then there is also Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2347049273
Gerry
August 12th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Acutally I take that back, both buzka.com and stage6.com don’t work. I though stage6 worked but it just displays as no comments, just like how it does for buzka. twitter.com profile pages also have the same problem.
Like I said, this really won’t work unless you create an open standard for an xml comment file or something like that. Your application needs to be able to catch the long tail and it won’t do that if you are trying to add support for sites one at a time.
Assaf
August 13th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Gerry,
Facebook does not provide access to their data, legally or technically. Twitter is not a blog, not something I would use co.mments to track.
The good folks at WordPress have done that work a long time ago, standardizing on identifiers for the comment block and each individual comment and I suggest following their template guidelines.
Gerry
August 14th, 2007 at 7:57 am
> Facebook does not provide access to their data, legally or technically.
Right you are. Good point. Although “technically” you could always create a co.mments account and use that to access the data; although I dunno about the legality of that and anyway you are right on this, it’s up to Facebook to do something about this, not you.
> Twitter is not a blog, not something I would use co.mments to track.
I would, and tried to. I wanted to track comments that a user leaves on their page: http://twitter.com/mikedemers The guy hasn’t left a comment for months and I don’t want to miss it when he finally does… this is the exact reason I use co.mments.
> The good folks at WordPress have done that work a long time ago, standardizing on identifiers for the comment block and each individual comment and I suggest following their template guidelines.
That’s great telling me, but what about all the other people that come to co.mments wondering how they can change there comments sections to make them compatible. They, as I did, will check your help section and not find the answer.
P.S. I just searched the Wordpress docs and found two entries that looked promising:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Comments_and_posts
http://codex.wordpress.org/Coding_Standards
^They were both blank. I searched for all the terms that you gave me and wasn’t successful. However even if I do find them I am worried that what I will find will be less of a comment formatting standard and more of a Wordpress comment formatting standard. But maybe I’m wrong, I couldn’t find the “template guidelines” or “standardizing on identifiers for the comment block”
Assaf
August 14th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
The Twitter page is a stream of posts in reverse chronological order, the first one just shows in a bigger box, but it’s different from comments on a post. You can use that page’s feed to catch up on all these posts and future ones from the same user.
The comment standard, and some people suggested an official microformat, I definitely need to put more time and energy into this and get something out.
Gerry
August 15th, 2007 at 7:51 am
> You can use that page’s feed to catch up on all these posts and future ones from the same user.
Yeah ok, true. Sorta. I could go on as to why this isn’t an ideal solution when compared with having it on co.mments, but I’ll leave it.
> The comment standard, and some people suggested an official microformat, I definitely need to put more time and energy into this and get something out.
Yeah a microformat would be great but I think a separate, simple XML standard would be a lot easier for you to implement quickly. It would also be much easier for people to add this to their sites without having to rewrite their stylesheets and page code.
Either way, I think trying to manually add sites is not the way to go. I think you guys have got the choice of coming up with a standard now which best fits you and which you have some control over, along with the credit for coming up with the format. Or you can wait for another company to do it and be stuck trying to work with a format that was built for their product.
Assaf
August 15th, 2007 at 12:57 pm
Gerry, there’s already an XML format: two versions of RSS and one Atom, and a feed reader will support either one. But most platforms don’t support it and it’s not up to the user to add it. And even if you do run the one platform I know that supports it well (WordPress), adding auto-discovery is much more complicated for users than relying on the template to do the right thing.
Gerry
August 18th, 2007 at 10:56 am
Assaf, really? What are the XML formats called and does co.mments.com understand them?
Also you should know that I’m not just talking about bloggers here, most of them would be using blogger.com or facebook so that’s not really you main problem. Your problem is the independently developed sites/blog systems with comments sections…. such as Stage6. If anybody on their coding team knows about your service the first thing they would have done is gone to you site to see how to add support.
You have a great service, I’m asking you to make it easier for your users to make it even better. Not trying to be offensive, but I’m not sure why there is reluctance, this whole thing seems like a no brainier to me as it’s crucial to the success or failure of co.mments. If people can use co.mments on a high percentage of sites then they will love the service as it helps them, if every second site doesn’t work then it means they need to monitor those in a different way. Using co.mments to monitor comments is an improved system. Using co.mments for half your sites and then some other system for the rest of the sites that don’t work is worse than not using co.mments at all.
Gerry
August 18th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Corrrection for above:
Also you should know that I’m not just talking about bloggers here, most of them would be using blogger.com or WORDPRESS so that’s not really you main problem.
Jay Levitt
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:58 pm
As a big forum/mailing list/newsgroup user, I’d love to see
* Invision Power Board
* phpBB
* vBulletin
* Google Groups
* Usenet newsgroups
For all of these, I’d want to see replies to specific threads, not just all new messages.
I think microformats would be a good way to go; any progress on that front? What about letting end-users contribute XLST docs, Ruby/Perl scripts, or whatever else that would help you support new formats? As others have mentioned, trying to support every possible format is like playing whack-a-mole, but if you crowdsource it you could guarantee that you’d support whatever it is that we cared about seeing.