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Slashing and hacking feeds

13 March 2008 14 Comments

More followup on feeds. I’ve set up a friendfeed which is available here. Amongst other things I’ve been trying to aggregate my comments on other people’s blogs. The way I am doing this is creating a tag in Google Reader which I have made public. When I leave a comment I try to subscribe to a comment feed for that Blog, I then tag it as ‘Comments feed’ which aggregates and makes it public as an RSS feed. I then suck that feed through yahoo pipes to find all the comments that are mine which then generates another feed, which I have included on my friendfeed.

So a couple of noob questions. Is there a better way to do this? Yes I could edit the Pipe every time I leave a comment to add the new feed and this would be neater, but it involves many more mouseclicks. It also means that any Blog that doesn’t have an obvious comments feed (BBGM is the most obvious example, but also Open Reading Frame and a number of others) I can’t do this with. Including, as it happens, this Blog (am I wrong about this, do we have a comments feed somewhere). Can anyone advise whether there are hidden comment feeds on blogs that I am missing? Incidentally for reference the comments feed for any blogspot blog can be found at xxx.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default if it’s not immediately obvious.

I also do a few other things, for instance aggregating all the posts and comments on chemtools blogs that are mine. And naturally my lab book is available through the friendfeed, although at the moment that just shows that I haven’t done any real work for a while…


14 Comments »

  • Neil said:

    On my FriendFeed wishlist: the ability to add any source that has a feed, like Profilactic. Discussion and a workaround here – they are considering it, apparently.

  • Neil said:

    On my FriendFeed wishlist: the ability to add any source that has a feed, like Profilactic. Discussion and a workaround here – they are considering it, apparently.

  • Michael Barton said:

    Hi Cameron,
    With regard to tracking comments, I think what you might be after is co.mments.
    http://wiki.co.mments.com/Main_Page
    Mike

  • Mike said:

    Hi Cameron,
    With regard to tracking comments, I think what you might be after is co.mments.
    http://wiki.co.mments.com/Main_Page
    Mike

  • Deepak said:

    Thanks for reminding me. You’re not the first :). Haven’t figured out a way to integrate a comments feed into my current template, but here it is

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/mndoci-comments

    As far as comment tracking is concerned, I gave up. Perhaps I do need to switch to Disqus or something

  • Deepak said:

    Thanks for reminding me. You’re not the first :). Haven’t figured out a way to integrate a comments feed into my current template, but here it is

    http://feeds.feedburner.com/mndoci-comments

    As far as comment tracking is concerned, I gave up. Perhaps I do need to switch to Disqus or something

  • Jonathan said:

    Your posts do have comments feeds. Just add /feed/ to the end of the permalink. So for this page:
    http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/03/13/slashing-and-hacking-feeds/feed/

    This is also the standard feed URL format for WordPress.

    Also, perhaps I’m not understanding what you are trying to do, but why do you need to edit anything to re-create your feed of comments on other people’s blogs? If you add it to Google Reader with the appropriate tag, it will be included in your “Comments feed” and can be filtered by Yahoo Pipes (I’ve never used the latter).

    As for blogs without comment feeds, can you use something like http://www.feedyes.com/ ?

  • Jonathan said:

    Your posts do have comments feeds. Just add /feed/ to the end of the permalink. So for this page:
    http://blog.openwetware.org/scienceintheopen/2008/03/13/slashing-and-hacking-feeds/feed/

    This is also the standard feed URL format for WordPress.

    Also, perhaps I’m not understanding what you are trying to do, but why do you need to edit anything to re-create your feed of comments on other people’s blogs? If you add it to Google Reader with the appropriate tag, it will be included in your “Comments feed” and can be filtered by Yahoo Pipes (I’ve never used the latter).

    As for blogs without comment feeds, can you use something like http://www.feedyes.com/ ?

  • bill said:

    I just use a Simpy tag, ‘lostart’. When I leave a comment, I hit the one-click bookmarklet for that tag.

    This means that I don’t have a feed for new comments in those conversations — when I want to check, I have to go to my Simpy/lostart page and click through to each comment thread — but it’s quick and simple.

  • bill said:

    I just use a Simpy tag, ‘lostart’. When I leave a comment, I hit the one-click bookmarklet for that tag.

    This means that I don’t have a feed for new comments in those conversations — when I want to check, I have to go to my Simpy/lostart page and click through to each comment thread — but it’s quick and simple.

  • bill said:

    I’ll talk to my technical consultant (wife!) about setting up a comments feed, too.

  • bill said:

    I’ll talk to my technical consultant (wife!) about setting up a comments feed, too.

  • Cameron Neylon said:

    @Jonathon, probably wasn’t being clear. I could set up a Pipe where I poll each comment feed directly, combine them, and then filter for me as author. But this requres editing the pipe each time I want to add a new blog. Using Google Reader as you say makes this a two click operation (subscribe, then add tag).

    I will look through the other suggestions when I have a chance and see what the options are. Of course if we had semantic search (with link to RSS feed) this wouldn’t be a problem.

  • Cameron Neylon said:

    @Jonathon, probably wasn’t being clear. I could set up a Pipe where I poll each comment feed directly, combine them, and then filter for me as author. But this requres editing the pipe each time I want to add a new blog. Using Google Reader as you say makes this a two click operation (subscribe, then add tag).

    I will look through the other suggestions when I have a chance and see what the options are. Of course if we had semantic search (with link to RSS feed) this wouldn’t be a problem.