You asked for e-mail alerts, so I added two types of e-mail alerts. Both provide the same information as the Web feed, but in a slightly different way.

Digest e-mail alerts send you an e-mail with a list of comments in all the conversations you are following. You will receive an e-mail that groups several conversations together, an easy way to be notified. If you can’t check your Web feed often, or want to receive notifications through cell phone or PDA, digest e-mail alerts are a good choice.

Individual e-mail alerts send you e-mail alerts for each individual conversation. You will receive more e-mails than digest. If you use your e-mail client to group (or thread) e-mails, then you can keep track of all comments from the same conversation. This screen shot is GMail grouping two e-mail alerts for the same conversation:

To start receiving e-mail alerts, you need to follow these four steps:

1. First, head over to your your account settings page and click the link to verify your e-mail address.
2. Check your inbox, in a few minutes you will receive an e-mail from co.mments.
3. Click the link in the e-mail to verify your e-mail address. You’re now ready to receive e-mail alerts.
4. Again, head over to your your account settings page, click the “Send Alerts” button and choose whether you want digest or individual e-mail alerts.

For security reasons, you’ll need to verify your e-mail address once, and every time you change your e-mail address.

Afterwards, you can turn e-mail alerts on and off at any time, and you can always switch from digest to individual and back.

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.

FeedBurner has a great feature that lets you decorate your feed with interactive features. They are called FeedFlares. You can add a FeedFlare that lets your readers tag a post with del.icio.us, e-mail the author, see Technorati cosmos, and much much more.

I just added a FeedFlare for tracking comments with co.mments. When you subscribe to the feed for this blog, you’ll see at the bottom of each post FeedFlare links. One lets you e-mail the post, another e-mail the author, you can bookmark the post with del.icio.us. And the last one lets you track all comments on this post. Click on it, and it will add the post to your co.mments tracking list.

If you are using FeedBurner and you want to add co.mments to your feed follow this simple steps:

1. From your FeedBurner page select the Optimize tab.
2. You will see a list of options on the left side, click on FeedFlare.
3. If you haven’t used FeedFlare before, now is the time to start. Enable FeedFlare for your feed.
4. Look for the text box that lets you add new FeedFlares, and enter this URL: http://co.mments.com/feed-flare.xml and click Add New Flare.
5. Save your changes. The save button is at the very bottom of the screen.
6. You’re done.

Whether you’re using co.mments with an account or without an account, there are certain things you’ll want to know.

Here’s the help page that explains the differences, and how to use co.mments with and without an account.

In my previous post I hinted at some potential problems. For the curious, here’s are some more details and how we got around them.

Feedback

As a user with an account, you want to tell when you’re logged in to co.mments. No rocket science. If you are logged in, co.mments will show your username at the top of the screen. The bookmarklet will also show your username, for quick visual feedback.

If you are not logged in, the bookmarklet will remind you to login. Ignore this if you don’t have an account.

The lost conversation

You’ve logged out of co.mments, or you’re using a different browser and didn’t login. You’ve just bookmarked a conversation, but it won’t be added to your account. It happens to me a lot. I can tell when it happens, the bookmarklet reminds me to login. But it’s frustrating to have to login, go back to the original page and bookmark it again.

Before allowing people to use co.mments without registration, I wanted to make sure it doesn’t annoy people who do have an account. The solution ended up being very straightforward.

When you login, co.mments automatically adds the recently bookmarked conversation to your account. It’s actually easier than it was before, when you had to login and bookmark again.

Switching

You’re using co.mments for a while and decide it’s about time to register for an account. Unfortunately, we can’t just change an anonymous account into a registered account. That will work for most people, but it could cause problems to people who share the same computer.

I decided to go with the element of least surprise. When you decide to register for an account, co.mments creates a brand new account, but offers you to start your new account with all the conversations you are currently tracking. There’s only two steps to switching:

1. Register for a new account and check the option to transfer your conversations.
2. Subscribe to your new account’s tracking feed. It’s a different feed that you’ll need to use as you add new conversations to your account.

I’m not too happy with the way my tracking page works right now. I’m tracking 49 conversations, and it’s too hard to navigate and find the new comments. The main conversations page is also too long and there’s no way to go back in time.
I intentionally placed more emphasis on the feeds, mostly because they were the harder problem to solve. Now it’s time to pay a bit more attention to the tracking page.

So I penciled this for the next major release, and started playing around with some ideas. Nothing good so far.

Then last morning. I got an e-mail from Eljo, who came up with an idea for a better UI that’s easier to use, whether you’re tracking two conversations or two hunderd. The e-mail included screenshots, which are now up on the Wiki.

I love it. The new design is just right. You can easily spot conversations with new comments, less scrolling, and if you have more than a week’s worth of conversations, you can navigate back and forth.

This will make all the difference. So big thanks to Eljo.