Comments Feed
Posted January 27th, 2006 @ 03:22pm by Erik J. Barzeski
I'm considering disabling the comments feed for this site. Does anyone use it? It'd mainly be to speed up rebuilds, so if even a few people use it it probably won't be worth the gains. Just let me know.
Posted 27 Jan 2006 at 8:45pm #
What do you mean comments feed? The comments are available in RSS? I do not see them using Pulp Fiction- it might be different if I were viewing the page in a browser that parsed RSS in the way Safari does.
Or perhaps you just mean disabling the ability of readers to comment?
In any case-- I don't think I have ever noticed a comments feed on anyones site. I use Safari exclusively on my Powerbook, but there are very few sites I read as feeds via Safari (I would typically be expanding to see images anyway), and it so happens, the sites I do regularly read as feed:// with Safari,
do not solicit comments. It is possible I have seen comments sifted into RSS feeds and never noticed it - a similar blindness that those who used to post HTML and other highly formatted text to ascii 7 domains like Usenet and mailing lists would never see the extra bandwidth they were using.
Posted 28 Jan 2006 at 8:18am #
Uh, Bud, see the RSS button that says "comments" to the right? It links to "feed://nslog.com/comments.rss"? That's what I mean.
Posted 28 Jan 2006 at 9:19am #
I think your comments feed is a good thing for following an ongoing discussion. It's also a lot smarter to have an all-in-one feed like that than to have a single comments feed for every post like others have. You don't want to subscribe to single-post comment feeds, that's just a clumsy solution. And on the other hand, reloading pages just to see if there's an answer or a new comment is also not the best solution.
I don't know how many subscribers you have to that feed, but it's a pretty good solution. Comment feeds in general also remind me of the fact that it might be a good thing to have a feed reader with client-side spamment filtering. It's incredible how much crap appears in old posts of many blogs...
Posted 01 Feb 2006 at 8:55am #
Google uses it, every time I post a comment here (like this one) google shows it in the google blog searchf or my name. Queue "I'm so vain".
I think comments feeds are a good thing.