Some feeds I subscribe to put comments in their main news feed. (e.g. Unsanity or Toomuchsexy) I can understand why this is good in some cases. Most often though, it results in posts I don’t care about being marked as unread/updated in my aggregator of choice each time a comment is added. This bugs me.

A good compromise seemed to add the comment count in the main news feed (CFD does this). I thought about doing that but it does not solve the issue of posts being marked as unread in my aggregator.

There was a debate about the issue of updated or modified posts on the NNW beta mailing list. Brent’s (NewNewsWire’s author) original position was to set a threshold for modifications/differences to a post below which the post would not be marked as modified. Arbitrary rules were voted down by most people. This was around the time the defunct Winer Watcher was making noise and Aaron proposed his HTML diff program to highlight specific changes to posts, thus making pretty much everyone happy.

So now I see Brent’s wisdom (although I really like the HTML Diff highlighting: check it out in the latest public beta release of NNW) and I’m still trying to find a good solution to my original problem.

I think I found a good solution and I just added Phil Ringnalda’s technique for creating a RSS feed for every post that will include their respective comments.

Yes yes, a separate feed for every single entry. Is it overkill? Probably but the computer does all the work. Will it be used by anyone? We’ll see. Will it increase the number of comments? Hopefully. For this post, here it is.

The idea is that if a post is of interests to you, you can subscribe to it, add it to a special temp group in your aggregator or something, and monitor it separately. Hopefully this will add the convenience of being able to know if someone commented on an entry while not messing with the global feed. I like the idea of keeping a certain control on what goes out of to the public at large, same goes for the home page.

The links for the feeds are present both in the individual archives and in the comment windows in the other kind of archives, including the home page: find the text You can subscribe to comments on this page via RSS.

Ahem.. and for those if you who don’t use an aggregator, well… move along, nothing to see.