No, my feed has not moved. It is still at feedburner in the same place. What is different is what it supports. I am now generating my feed direct from my template to RSS 2.0 using my new hAtom2RSS converter. This script supports both XOXO Blog Format and hAtom templates, including all extensions to hAtom described by the XOXO Blog Format. It outputs the comments, wfw:commentFeed, and slash:comments tags when the appropriate data is provided in the page. While this doesn’t do much that is visible in most current readers, what it does do is make the ‘comment count’ option for FeedFlare work. So I now have comment counts being displayed in my feed from a Blogger blog! I highly reccomend that anyone using the hAtom2RSS converter pair it with FeedBurner, if for no other reason than speed. The script polls your home page every time it is accessed, so having FeedBurner cache the feed will definately provide a performance boost.

hAtom2RSS is a script that takes the URL to an XOXO Blog Format or hAtom blog and generates an RSS 2.0 feed for posts. The script supports all XOXO Blog Format extensions to hAtom. It also generates comments, wfw:commentFeed, and slash:comments tags when the appropriate data is available in the page.

I have change my blog over to a new template! This template is much more efficient with screen space, easier to read, and XOXO Blog Format compatible. For now this means that I do not have to have a separate code snippet to generate my comments feed, but some other services are in the works, including a script to generate better feeds (ie, ones that include the wfw:commentRss tag).

This post is also the first one I am trying from Performancing for Firefox. It seems really nice, and is definately more conveniant. The only things I wish it would do are (1) link to my del.icio.us account, instead of to technorati (2) support multiple del.icio.us accounts for adding posts from different blogs to different accounts (3) support stuffing the first 255 characters of a post into the del.icio.us account.

Yes, you read that correctly… I just got a 29% on my chem midterm… not good… There’s questions on there we haven’t studied yet, and he says in the lesson that he’ll ‘pad’ our grade accordingly… but either way I just flunked…. Not good, since my grades are in an ever-deepening tailspin for all my courses… even my once-A+ social studies (weird for me, but hey :P) is down into the 80s and everything else is lower. Except math, but I’m betting I start bombing it next… *sigh* if you guys could pray for me, I’d really appreciate it… sometimes I want to pull out of this… and sometimes I just wish it were over… but if I flunk this year my whole future is… well… it isn’t 😛 Might as well shoot myself in the head if I’m just going to flunk out… no I don’t quite mean that… *sigh*… I can’t figure it out… school used to be a sleepthroughitandpasswithhighmarks thing… now I can’t concentrate on anything and motivating myself just to get my work done is hard enough….

There has been much discussion recently about comment syndication. I have made some of my own contributions to this, including Commentosphere and Blogger Recent Comments. While all of this is good and useful in its own way, syndication is useless without aggregation.

Currently, to track comments for interesting discussion / replies to your own you must subscribe to many comments feeds from different blogs and posts. This will quickly clutter your feedreader even if you only subscribe to the ones that are most important. Something that can help this, at least a little, is combining the feeds together into one megafeed, using something like feedshake or the Commentosphere Aggregator (see my aggregator for an example). While this works to some degree, it is ultimately unsatisfactory.

So here’s the idea — have feed readers aggregate comments alongside the post. A post then appears unread if it has unread comments as well as if it is itself unread. The new comments are highlighted on viewing the feed and marked unread. Another possibility would be to have a little ‘comments’ icon next to the post title that shows if there are no comments, new comments, or all read comments on a post. Clicking the icon would bring up the comments for that post (likely within the aggragator, not just a link to the #comments or anything like that).

This whole idea does, of course, assume that the aggregator can get to the comments somehow. There needs to be some way to take the link URL (usually to the post page) and get the comments feed URL for that post. (Assuming there is one. If there isn’t, that’s in the realm of syndication, not aggregation.) To facilitate this, I am proposing a simple piece of standard markup. Most blogs that have comments feeds for every post have a link to that feed somewhere on the post page. If we made it standard protocol to set rel=”alternate comments” (obviously, just like with relTag, you can have other things in the rel-list as well, but require both of these) for these links, the aggregators could pull them out of the page and get the appropriate URL. The aggregator could then get the comments feeds and use them to produce the features outlined above.