Participating in the comments section of particularly interesting blog posts is a lot of fun and helps build community. But one of the annoyances in doing so is that there’s really no good way to keep track of comments. Unlike new posts in someone’s RSS Feed, most aggregators won’t tell you when there is a new comment.
Sure, there is coComment, but since I like to post comments using my RSS Aggregator via the CommentAPI, coComment isn’t such a help there.
But help is on the way. Dare Obasanjo recently announced the beta release of Jubilee, the code name for RSS Bandit 1.5. One of the more interesting features (and my favorite) included in this release is comment watching.
When reading an interesting post, you can right click on the post and select the Watch Comments option. The following screenshot demonstrates.
In a stroke of pure vanity, I will select a blog post in Andrew Stopford’s blog that makes a reference to me and click Watch Comments.
Now if I wait long enough, someone will eventually leave a comment on that post. Of course, why leave it to chance? I went ahead and left a comment via the browser (sorry Andrew).
When RSS Bandit updates, it shows me that someone left a comment in my Developers category by turning that category green.
Expanding that node, I can dig down to the post and read the new comment.
Of course, this only works for blogs that support wfw:commentRss. Unfortunately, one of my favorite blogs, CodingHorror, which happens to always have lively conversation in the comments section, doesn’t support it. Jeff, it’s time to move to Subtext!
Kudos go out to Dare and Torsten! Unfortunately, I’ve been overcommitted and have not been able to contribute to RSS Bandit lately.