Advanced Access Blog

Reading blogs can be a time wasting addiction.  Usually a good addiction but it still can waste your time. We’ve all been there, clicking away through our favorite blogs to see what’s new, what secrets we can learn, and to further our education.  Many times it’s not the blog posts that are what you want to read.  Am I right?  What you are curious to read is the comments, especially on popular websites where the comments come fast and furious. Many times you can learn more through the comments than from the actual post.

Many of you (including me!) have graduated from clicking through your favorite bookmarks and refreshing the website a few times to a day to see when new posts come along to reading posts via an RSS reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines.  Reading updated blog posts via an RSS reader is a huge time saver.  Especially if you have over 10 or 20 regular blogs that you like to browse through on a regular basis. The RSS reader updates you when new posts come along and you can view them through your reader, or click through to the website.

When you click through to the website to see the full post, you usually get the benefit of reading the comments.  If the comments are interesting you will probably want to continue to visit the website and keep up with the conversation.  That can add to your busy day if you are constantly checking back for updated comments. If you post a comment and join the conversation you can usually be automatically updated.  If you prefer to lurk, you may be interested to know you can subscribe to a comment feed on the entire blog, or particular blog posts.

Some websites will give you the link to subscribe to the entire ‘Comment Feed’ as seen on SEOMoz.org for example). Other sites, such as Matt Cutts’ blog, lets you subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on a particular post.  (Scroll to the bottom of the post and there is a link right below the last comment.)

I recently found out that WordPress and Blogger both have their own built in comment feeds that many times are not broadcast on the blogs but are still accessible via an RSS feed. 

For WordPress, the default comment subscription link is hosted in:
/comments/feed/
BlAAwg.com is hosted on WordPress so our comment subscription link would be:
http://www.blaawg.com/comments/feed

For Blogger, the default comment subscription link is hosted in:
/feed/comments/default
Many Blogger blogs are on sub domains such as: blog.blogspot.com
The comment feed URL would be something like this:
http://blog.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

As I just realized you could subscribe to these helpful feeds, I hope this post helps other people! Hopefully this shortcut saves you some valuable time with keeping up on the conversation. Let me know if you know of any other shortcuts on comment subscriptions for other blog software.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 at 5:13 am and is filed under Techie Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.