Experimental RSS feed: comments directly available in posts

Frederick Giasson

Some months ago I was asking a question: “Comments are integral part of posts. Why blog systems, like Radio Userland, do not take this fact into account?”

Fred, do not wait until somebody do it, otherwise you will wait for a long time I think… So I got an hour of my time today to test the concept. I hacked the b2Evoltuion blog system to build such a RSS feed.

The premise of the experience is that comments leaved by readers are integral part of blog posts. In fact, if someone leave a comment, most of the time it is to add something new to the blog’s post, something that have an informative value. I know it because my readers are good at it. I wanted to reflect that fact in my feeds content. So, it is what I do.

There is what it look like.



  1. The comments are placed at the end of the post
  2. The header of the comment section
  3. The permalink of this specific comment
  4. The number of the comment in the thread
  5. The name of the comment’s author and a link to his URL
  6. A link that will redirect the reader to the place where he could add his comment
  7. The comment in question
  8. The list of comments continue bellow

Simple no? Now the feed subscribers do not only have access to the post but also to the comments wrote about the post, by other readers, all that in the feed reader of their choice.

You want to have a look at that feed? You only have to subscribe to this URL:
https://fgiasson.com/blog/xmlsrv/rss2.feedwithcomments.php?blog=4

Advantages:

  • It reflects the fact that comments are an integral part of posts
  • Each time a post is commented, feed subscribers will be notified. It is sure that it depends on the feed reader, if the feed reader check if a change has been performed on an entry, then the reader will be notified, otherwise he will not.

Disadvantages:

  • It adds information to the web feed and it become much more voluminous.

What do you think of it? Could you be interesting in subscribing to such a feed? Do you think that it could be a good information to have in a blog feed?

Note

It is really ease to add this feature to your blog. If you are using b2Evolution, you only have to download this php file and to put it in your /blog/xmlsrv/ directory. After that you will have access to it at that url:

yourdomainname.com/blog/xmlsrv/
rss2.feedwithcomments.php?blog=X

where X is the number of the blog where you would like to implement the feature.

Thank to Jack Vinson to remember me that I already wanted such a feature.

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Timothy Findley

Frederick Giasson

 
“Someone once said to Clive: do you think we will ever be forgiven for what we’ve done? They meant their generation and the war and what the war had done to civilization. Clive said something I’ve never forgotten. He said: I doubt we’ll ever be forgiven. All I hope is — they’ll remember we were human beings.”

— Timothy Findley
 

Welcome to this new version of the Fred On Something blog

Frederick Giasson

I am proud to announce the opening of the new version of the Fred On Something blog.

Why have I changed the blog? The first reason is to be able to blog when I will be in India, in some months. I needed to have access to a web interface to publish my posts and Radio Userland did not give me that possibility. So I started to search for a blogging platform and hosting service. It is at that time that the “28 things to check when searching for a blog system and a hosting service” list is born.

I finally got all these wanted features at a local traditional web hosting company that created a new blog hosting service last week. I got this beautiful package for 9$ CND per month at IWeb-Hosting. The blogging system used by Iweb-Hosting is b2Evolution. It is a beautiful piece of software wrote by Francois Planque. It is really easy to install and to customize.

The transfer had been a pain. I had to repost all my posts and comments, and also had to change the dates of each of them. Why? Because there is no any exportation feature in Radio Userland, so I had to do it by hand. It took me around 12 hours to populate my blogs with posts and comments. So take care of this more than essential feature when you search for a blog system!

I had modified and added many things to the basic installation of b2Evolution. So if you find something interesting and would like to add it to your b2Evoltion’s installation, feel free to contact me and I will send you all the code and information you need to implement the feature.

What is new in this version of Fred On Something’s blog?

  • A comments blog
  • A links blog
  • A quotes blog
  • The access to some articles I wrote
  • The possibility to put your avatar (via Gravatar) when you comment
  • The possibility to syndicate all individual blogs
  • The possibility to syndicate the aggregator blog (this blog aggregate all the other blogs. So if you want to be warn when something appear on one of these blogs, syndicate it)
  • The possibility to syndicate the comments feeds
  • A good search engine
  • A domain name
  • And other cool little things that you will discover while surfing it

I hope you will enjoy this new blog.

Please leave me your impressions and suggestions to improve it.