Keith Devens .com

CALL TO ACTION: Weblog comment subscriptions

Ok, this must be a common problem. I know I left a comment on someone's weblog a few days ago, but I can't remember where it was. This happens a lot, where I have to fill my brain with reminders to go back and check sites I've commented on for replies. And I really don't leave comments places all that often.

So this is a call to action. Everyone who has comments on their web sites should have a way to subscribe to that post so that you receive an e-mail when a reply is made. RSS feeds for comments on a post aren't good enough, for a whole bunch of reasons. Who wants to have to subscribe to an RSS feed for every place they ever leave a comment? How long do you wait to unsubscribe? Weblog comment subscriptions should be a "push" technology; you shouldn't have to think about it unless there's something there. Hey, and people complain about bandwidth use for a main RSS feed... How much will that be multiplied if people subscribe to comment feeds for every post?

There are a few ways to do this. You could get an e-mail for every reply that's made, but that could quickly flood you with e-mail. It doesn't scale well, and I guarantee you messages are harder to put in context this way. The better solution, and the one that message boards use, is to e-mail you when there's a new post made, but then not e-mail you again until you've visited the site and seen all the new posts. This scales better.

Plus, it solves another problem. Let's say someone's e-mail address changes, but comments are still being made. If messages start bouncing, they'll keep on bouncing as long as comments keep being made. However, if e-mails are only sent once until the person visits the site again, if an e-mail is sent and bounces, then that's the only one that'll ever have to be sent to that address again.

I used to have a subscription feature on my site. I'll be implementing it again soon when I'm done with my form stuff.

Update: Looks like this is already planned for Manila and/or Radio. Also see Dan Sugalski's post on Better blog distribution. Also see the comments on Sam Ruby's blog.

Permalink | 12 Comments | id 3792

18:06 (utc-4)
edited: 2003-04-22 15:30 (utc-4)

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How will you recognize the visitors when they come back to see the new posts?

You'll have to click on a link included with the notification e-mail that has a special ID in it.

I could use cookies too, either in addition to or instead of the link in the notification e-mail, but I don't like that so much for various reasons that I'm too lazy to type out right now. If you really want to hear why I'm against using cookies for this, ask.

This will only work for people with blogs, but tell me what you think. Ok, so, I read Keith's blog frequently... get to read his posts, his readers' posts, and his responses to his readers' posts... but, still feel like I haven't gotten to know the real Keith (i.e. what Keith says on other blogs)... SO, why don't, when you post a comment on someone's site, enter in your name, email, url, etc. as you normally would, AND a link to some sort of file/app that keeps track of where you've commented last and displays some sort of rolodex of your most recent comments with links to the other blog/your comment, the date and time of your comment, and the total number of comments posted to that post... any time a new comment has been made to post X on blog Y, the link to post X will make its way to the top of keith's 'my comments on other sites' rolodex and the comment number count for that line item will increase by one. Yeah, that was all over the place, but I don't feel like rethinking or retyping any of this now... I think I have a little something going here... ask me if you're interested.

Monday, April 21, 2003

CALL TO ACTION: Weblog comment subscriptions

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