Mar 7, 2007

Did you know that you can track comments to your posts?

So far, this blog has exceeded my hopes. You guys are making such great posts and we're already seeing ideas come to life. For those of you who are not terribly familiar with Blogger, I am putting together this quick tutorial on how to track your comments, without having to come back and scroll through all the posts.

This will be easiest for those of you who already use an RSS Aggregator of some sort. An RSS Aggregator is utility that allows you to monitor updates to enabled website. I happen to use Bloglines, and will demo how I use it here, but there are many options to choose from.

Any image can be clicked to make it bigger.

Step 1: Extend your post
Go to the very bottom of your post and click on the time stamp.

This will cause your post to come up by itself.

Step 2: Click the link marked, "Post Comments (Atom)"


Scroll down to the bottom of this page and look for the link marked, "Post Comment (Atom)"
This will open the RSS feed. Depending on your browser, it may come up as just a page full of text or, as per the example below with Firefox, it will come up as a neatly formatted page. Go to the address bar, copy the link and enter it into your RSS Aggregator application.



If you are a
Bloglines person, you can do the following.


After copying the RSS feed URL, click the ADD button in
Bloglines .
Enter the address into the URL field and press, SUBSCRIBE.


Now you can click SUBSCRIBE again or you can be a bit more organized about it and create a folder just for comments.

First, click the FOLDER pull down.
A dialog box will appear. Enter the name of the new folder. Click OK.
Then click SUBSCRIBE.

For all subsequent feeds, you can simply opt to save them directly to this new comments folder. Easy Peasy.

Now, whenever you check your feeds, you'll be able to see any new comments posted to your entry.

2 comments:

Liz K. said...

OMG. I never knew this!

File under: I learned something new today!

Julia (MindofWinter) said...

Nice! I had NO IDEA that I could do this through blogger - it's a great feature. And I totally agree with you about our CALers - they rock!