New RSS feed with comments
I'm not lovin' it. Sorry, but it's true. I'm not sure if it's a bug with NewzCrawler or something with RSS2, but when new comments come in for the post, it gets updated in NC, but it doesn't change back to unread. It just replaces the old entry with the new one. So I don't realize that anything new is there for me to read.
Now, I understand why this feed is popular. It lets you exclude based on category so if you have restricted posts, you can leave them out of your feed and the comments will not go either.
That said, I like the feed that Brad's put together. You can check it out. I'll add a feed like that this weekend and write up instructions for interested parties.
Update: Screenshot of NewzCrawler modelling Brad's spiffy new feed.
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in NC it will say OK in the status line if a post was updated instead of the usual 'not modified'. But your right you have to go looking at the posts to see which was updated.
The other thing that's not good about the one everybody else is using is that you don't get to see comments on any post that's older than what the RSS feed is showing. With my feed now, I can see a comment come in, even if it's on a 9 month old post. It's even more valuable when you consider using it for a photoblog.
+1 vote for me.
Oh, and the "OK" thing doesn't help you much, either, for two reasons. One is some people have dynamic RSS, and their status is always "OK". The other is that the "OK" status is sitting around for just until the NEXT time you update, which is 30-60 minutes for most of my feeds.
I submitted the "unread" thing as what I feel is a legit bug against NewzCrawler.
That makes sense to me; thanks for sharing why I was feeling like they weren't the best idea. Brad's is the first combined feed that I've seen that looks like it would be helpful. That's great!
I'm interested! *raising hand*
The problem I have with comments separated from the post in feeds is the equality of the comments with the posts. I don't want to read what's been said on posts I wasn't interested enough in to comment on in the first place. And I don't want to see 50 unread messages for a popular blog and have to scan through them all to get to what I really want to read especially if I just checked it 30 minutes ago. I understand for a tech blog, but for regular blogs it would be too much information.
Ooh, Ooh, Mr. Kotter!
If we replace the "subject" part of the feed with the entry title instead of the post's category, then couldn't we just sort by the "subject" field and see all the comments linked with their posts? Might be a middle ground for the issue I first mentioned.
Cis stole my comment. I'm not thrilled with the comments separated from the posts. But if you can sort by the entry title, that would help. I'm going to tinker with it.
Of course, I will wind up doing whatever you suggest, Obi Wan.
In my combined feed, I did prefix "Post:" and "Comment:" in the title area, so it's easy to sort by title if that's what you want.
I was thinking of changing what Brad did and putting the "Post:" and "Comment:" tags after the entry's title so that you could have the comments for a particular post together.
Yeah, that's what I was going to do, too, but it's still not PERFECT. If you sort by title or subject, you can't sort by date. I'd like a multi-level sort: by title then by date. I know, picky, picky, picky...
Yaknow, I'm an eediot. If NC works like Outlook (I don't have NC at work to play with), then sorting by subject still keeps the posts within the subject in the right order. And anything new is highlighted, so it shouldn't be that bad after all. I'm going to switch mine over tonight and see how it looks.
Ya know what would be really perfect? I had a brainstorm while laying in bed.
If there was a way to have a feed that had multiple levels. Like a newsgroup. I have no idea if this is possible, but I'll show some examples anyhow. Okay, the newsgroups I read show up like this:
Newsgroup Feed
So what if there was a way to make comments be in the same feed as the posts and act as a lower level in the feed? It might look something like this:
Feed Thread
I just don't know what is and isn't possible with feeds and feed readers rendering. But this is a tried and true method for reading newsgroups; the main post and then the comments below it, and it seems like it might be really good for all of the reasons we've mentioned above.
What do you think?
Okay, my htaccess stuff is apparently blocking those links -- try this:
feeds.html
Kristine, sadly afaik your idea isn't possible. The only thing that I could think of to do is to include the comments in the actual content of an item. So, it would be like viewing the entry's individual archive on the site, only it would be in your newsreader.
I was actually going to throw some sort of comments feed together tonight, so I might just see how that will look.
On second thought, that won't work, either. I doubt that the entry with the new comment would show up as unread, because you're already read it, even though it's got new content. Hrm.
There's definitely a bug in NewzCrawler when using RSS 2.0 feeds, when a post is updated, there's no visual indication that it's been updated if you've already read it. I posted it as a bug to NC help forum, so I'm hopeful they'll give us a checkbox for this (since I can see people wanting it both ways, I guess).
Hi, can I contact you by ICQ ? Spasibo.