I have completed the a Blogger comments syndication service, which grew from a hack I proposed on Some Assembly Required. Dubbed Blogger Recent Comments, this service takes the URL to a compatible Blogger blog and generates an RSS, JSON, JavaScript, or XHTML feed of the recent comments to that blog. It can also generate feeds for recent comments to individual post pages. For blogs that are set up per the instructions, comments are archived by the service as they come in, the service being notified of new comments via email, thus enabling the service to include new comments to old posts in the feed (unlike the Farrago Recent Comments Hack, which only shows new comments to posts on the main page). Setting up your blog to be compatible (per these instructions) is relatively painless, and afterwards you should never have to worry about it again, but you gain the benefits of comments feeds and optional sidebar elements.
Blogger Comment Syndication Service
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9 Responses
it’s hard to understand… i don’t now how to do it. am i stupid?
What exactly are you having a hard time understanding? The most complicated part is probably getting your page to be well-formed XML. All it really needs is to be well formed up until just after the <body> tag where you insert the snippet, so that could simplify things a bit more for you 🙂 Let me know if I can be a help in any other way.
Hi there,
I love the hack idea, and I’ve implemented it on my template and set up a gmail filter. Now I have a “valid” RSS comment feed, but there’s no content. That is, no comments have shown up. Any idea what’s going wrong?
Hey there 🙂
The problem was that you were starting your header with <HEAD> and ending it with </head> — poorly formed XML. I have added a special-case fix to the parser for this, but really you should clean up your template to prevent this sort of thing 🙂 You feed is populated with data now though, thanks to my ‘quick fix’
Thanks for the help! I’ll have to give my template a once-over.
cool
Stephen,
Your solution is pretty good. You might take a look at the similar service I have created here and see the similarities. My “More…” feature for example would be a neat addition, and the option to show more detail in the actual sidebar listing.
Well, I might be very inclined towards further improvements… except that the entire service is obsolete now… Blogger BETA has comment feeds for the whole blog and per-post…
excellent .. keep up the good work