Lazy Web Request: Google Reader and comments
I have been using Google Reader for quite some time now and thoroughly enjoy the feed synchronization that comes from this hosted solution. Additionally, I very much enjoy being able to zip through my feeds. I find myself trying to j and k’ing through other lists of data as well. Unfortunately, it doesnt always work. But, I digress…
The real point of this post is to ask how other people keep track of the comments that they have posted to articles. Currently, what I’m doing is starring the article, and then I go back through to locate the ones I’ve commented on to see if there’s further discussion. This seems *much* too manual, and surely there is a better way to do this.
Here’s where I solicit your help, dear reader… Let me know in the comments how you keep track of articles that you’ve posted comments to and how you keep the conversation going. Thanks in advance for your ideas.
Hmm, wanted to know a better way of doing this myself - especially as Google Reader does not support the threaded comments thing like other RSS readers do. I guess I’ll have to star this article and keep checking back here to find if anyone has an answer :-)
You might give coComment a try: http://www.cocomment.com/
@joey: do you set up a Yahoo Pipe to create a feed for every comment that you post to an external site? That’s the problem I’m trying to solve. mattberther.com already has comments available via an RSS feed (see the RSS 2.0 link directly above your comment).
@phil: I’ll look into it. Thanks!
@matt,
No, I don’t do that and agree that a more elegant solution is needed. The problem is not every blogging platform provides comments rss in the same way (some not at all). Right now, in the LosTechies pipe, I’m just iterating over LT’s OPML file, and munging the urls to point to each person’s comments feed and then producing one aggregated view of the site’s comments in rss.
I supposed you could attempt to export your OPML from google reader, and do the same kind of thing. But again, you’ll run into the inconsistency between blogging platforms.
CoComment is a good route, but unfortunately not all blog engines support that either.
I use http://co.mments.com. It mostly works great. Much better than the aforementioned CoComment. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of the threads you’re following and have it show right back up in Google Reader.
Over at LosTechies, I used Yahoo Pipes to set up an aggregated RSS feed of all comments posted to any of our blogs at LosTechies. That seems like the best universal way of doing it. Especially in the cases, like Community Server, that don’t provide an OOTB way to have a “master” comments feed.