SubscribeHow about a way to track a whole blog?
So rather than having to click the bookmarklet for each comments page, we can just track the whole site.
Some people may not see the need for this, especially if a blog is very busy and have many many comments. But for a more quiet blog, with only several comments. It’s useful, I think.
Posted by coconut in General on Friday, July 21st, 2006. You can follow any responses using co.mments, leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
hombrelobo
July 21st, 2006 at 6:33 am
I like the idea. For small sites it is very useful.
Ohh, and I love co.mments ……
Michel
July 21st, 2006 at 7:00 am
I don’t think this is neccesary. The most blogengines supply a feed for comments, so if they want to track all the comments on a blog the can use this.
coconut
July 21st, 2006 at 8:36 am
Michel, Yes some blogs have a link where you can have all comments to all posts come as one feed. But for those blogs that don’t have such a “Comments Feed”, I make this suggestion.
mmeiser
August 18th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Brilliant! actually
I like it.
The problem with the RSS feeds is they don’t thread… I’ve been searching for a solution to this forever. My best solution was to put the RSS feed through and RSS-to-email tool, but I haven’t had time to screw with the software to make sure the subjects of the emails correspond so gmail or mail.app or other threaded apps will thread them. I’d MUCH rather use a conversation tracker like co.comments than over utilize my email account.
Speaking of which, there SHOULD be a setting to send email when certain threads update.
Just getting into co.comments BTW, finally have time… funny thing is I already don’t know how I lived without it.
Assaf
August 19th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
mmeiser,
I know there’s threading support in Atom 1.0, but feed readers don’t support it yet. I can’t wait for them to start adding it.
Meanwhile, if you like e-mail there’s an easier solution. co.mments will be doing e-mails in a few days. I’m doing the final testing right now.
mmeiser
August 26th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
Ha! I discovered your response using co.comments. Been using it for a week now. I find people NEVER or very rarely respond to my comments directly… if they do it’s email. It’s pretty much what I expected… people leave comments and their just expected to be dead ends… loose voices in the wind.
That said… SIGN ME UP for the emails.
Here’s what I’d like to see, for the sake of consideration.
1) responses MUST thread… this means the subject of the email should be
“RE: the title of the blog original post or page”
2) put the “nickname” of the person posting the comment in the “from” field of the email… most RSS to email put it in the subject of the email… this screws up threading. It’s important information… and works great in the from field just like mailing lists… but be sure to put “DONOTREPLY@co.comments.com” as the email addy.
3) It may be important to quote all or most of the original post for contextual reasons. There’s nothing like receiving an email that says
“yeah that was a pretty cool post”
or
“I agree with jim”
…and having to click on the link back to the original post on the blog to see what the hell they were talking about. This is once again the primary problem with RSS.. there’s no context.. Context is of course EXTREMELY important.
For this reason I would suggest the firest email actually included not only part of the post (like the first 500 words or so)… but maybee even all the previous comments. Luckily blog comments are very word light. So the email probably still will be relatively light.
Then each comment or response after the first could include JUST the new comments since any email threading apps will associate it with the original email.
Did that make sense? Because I assure you it’s genius.
4) Some users would probably really enjoy a feature to “send me no more than one email a day for this thread” though I most blogs I read and comment on I’d just as soon get each comment as it’s posted.
I look forward to seeing and testing this new feature.
Assaf
August 26th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
mmeiser,
First, thanks for the feedback. This is the first release for e-mail alerts, and I’m looking for more ideas to make it even better.
1) I use the title as the subject, so the responses thread nicely. I happen to use GMail, so I just archive alerts after I read them. When I get a new alert, it pops up the entire conversation from the archive.
2) Right now, if there are two (or more) new comments on the same conversation, you’ll get them in a single e-mail. I think it’s easier to read this way, but it can’t support changing the from field.
Also, keeping the from field to co.mments makes it easier to see what the e-mail is about and apply filerting rules.
3) It does quote the original post to preserve context. But I’m thinking of changing it, so it only quotes the post in the first e-mail.
4) You can choose between individual e-mails (one per conversation, more frequent) and digest (all your conversations, daily).
Michael Meiser
August 27th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
First, thanks!
I’ve only just begun to use it. But I’m VERY pleased.
Please don’t change a thing yet. I’ve got to use it a lot more heavily and test it some more, but it seems to work just perfectly providing the proper amount of context so that I can easily be alerted to responses and follow them.
I’m going to have to find some more active forums like slashdot or digg or somehting to put it through the works.
BTW… just joking… Digg and slashdot are overkill. I just used them as examples. I’m sure I can find some posts that get around 50 responses.
The only other thing I’d LOVE to see is a way to subscribe to a whole blog… For example we have this horrid expriment over at evilvlog.com and it has prolific commenting. Yet there’s no good way to follow the conversation. It’s a great example of a website where I’d want to follow every comment. Because we have abut 40 editors to one blog and they’re all close friends. It’d be a good test for me of co.mments. I have a few other collaborative projects as well.
The big idea being here is that BLOGS can become more sociable and conversational like yahoo groups or google groups.
1) subsribe to comments on individual threads
2) subscribe to comments on whole blogs
You can then offer not only bookmarklets and widgets for people to put on posts.
But a widget for subscribing to a whole blog… and tools for management of subscriptions.