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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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26 April 2004

Since upgrading the version of Textpattern that runs this site back in February, I’ve been utilizing a feature which places the current comment count at the end of the title in both my Atom and RSS fields. The idea of this feature is that it enables those who read this site via those feeds to see when new comments are added.

Since enabling the feature, I’ve had feedback from readers both positive and negative in nature. A couple of people have told me that they find it really useful, whereas others are finding it annoying that services they have monitoring my feeds are reporting new posts when none exist (just comments). Either way, the level of feedback I’ve received has prompted me to reevaluate the feature. As far as I can see, there are a number of options.

  1. Leave the feeds as they are and hope not too many people get pissed off by it
  2. Get all retro and forget the comment count all together
  3. Provide an alternative version of the feeds without the comment count – would make each camp happy, but would be more confusing when subscribing (which feed to chose?)
  4. Provide a separate feed of comments. This would have the advantage of being able to read all content via the feeds, but has the disadvantage of fragmenting the content across disparate feeds.
  5. Something else I haven’t thought of yet.

I’m leaning towards the fourth option – providing a separate comments feed. But do comments feeds really work? Do you subscribe to any? So, dear readers – especially those of you who read via Atom or RSS – I need your feedback. What’s a girl to do?

- Drew McLellan

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  1. § Nathan Pitman: I turned off my comment counts on the RSS feed since it was adding multiple entries to the MXNA for my feed.

    First off I thought this was great, since I’m sure it generated more traffic to my site, but then I thought that I’m sure it’d be annoying other blog authors.

    If I were you, I’d go for option 4, and provide users with a little pop up that explains the difference between the feeds… :?
  2. § Harold Bakker: I really like option 4. Sure, having multiple feeds can be distracting, but having read items pop up constantly even though you’ve already read them (sometimes four times) is more annoying.

    As a lot of feeds are starting to add a commentcount the value of quickly seeing what’s truly new gets lost, losing the advantage of really simple syndication.
  3. § Tim: +1 on option 4. I like new to mean new.
  4. § Pete F.: I’m not a fan of the numbers in brackets – option 4 gets my vote too.

    (Having said that, I don’t actually subscribe to any “comments only” feeds, but that doesn’t stop me clicking through to the story if I’m interested in seeing what others have put — or if I plan to contribute myself.)
  5. § DD: You should do: 2. Get all retro and forget the comment count all together.

    ... nah just kidding. ;-)

    In my opinion, you should switch to the idea of: 3. Provide an alternative version of the feeds without the comment count would make each camp happy, but would be more confusing when subscribing (which feed to chose?)

    I see alot of online blogs are doing this now, and so far it seems the popular way to go.
  6. § Dave: I think option 5 is the best, but you should do 3. The problem with 4 is that people might only be following comments on some posts and not others. People reading a feed like it is now can quickly see if posts they’re watching have new comments and ignore ones they’re not watching.

    I think comment management is the next big area weblog software should be dealing with. Lots and lots of posts on lots and lots of weblogs could have better discussion on them if people had a better was to follow the conversations. Email notification doesn’t scale well, and no one’s come up with a good alternative solution (that I’ve seen) yet.
  7. § Lars: 4 oh 4!

    I already subscribe to five or six comment feeds.

    Providing an indication of what post each comment belongs to is something I miss with most of the feeds I’ve seen though (including a majority of the ones I subscribe to), so that’s on my wishlist too if you decide to go the No. 4 route.
  8. § Mike Jones: I hate comment only feeds and don’t subscribe to them anymore because of two reasons:
    1. I then get comments for post I long stopped caring about (including ones that are being spammed)
    2. I lose the understanding of the ‘flow’ of conversation because the comment is out of context.

    I like the way you do it at the moment because it means I get into the comments more as opposed to a lot of sites where I forget about the post once its read. I would personally go with 3. because I don’t think readers are as thick as we make them sound sometimes. A little “Whats the difference” pop-up isn’t going to kill anybody and your certainly eloquent enough Drew to make it easy to understand.

    The only bad thing I would say about the comment number in subject thing is I open Bloglines and me thinks “oooo a new exciting post from Drew” then “Doh! Just another Page 23 comment” ;]
  9. § Lars: Forgot to mention that in addition to having an overall comment feed, you could offer comment feeds for each post.

    There’s your number 5.
  10. § waylman: I like number 3 as well. I’d explain why, but Mike Jones already has above. Couldn’t have said it better myself Mike.
  11. § Daniel Jarrett: I find it very annoying, so please don’t choose 1).
  12. § Drew: I’ve turned off the comment count for the time being. Apologies if the action itself has notified you of 10 new posts!

    I’ll see if I can implement an alternative in the next few days.
  13. § hass: Drew, can you explain to a non-programmer how to turn off the comment count?
  14. § hass: Sorry, I just grabbed your rss feed using the Firefox RSS reader extension, when I tried to save the feed title the lt, gt symbols caused a parsing error, the atom feed works fine.
  15. § Lisa: I like comments only feeds. But I prefer for them to have an excerpt (say 1-2 lines) of the post and the preceding comments, so that I know the context.

    So I’m all for option 4… ;)
  16. § Marcus Tucker: Option 3 please! The status quo is rather annoying… makes it hard to see the wood for all the trees… ;)

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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