Sending the number of comments with your feed

Comments

1. James E. Robinson, III (5 comments.) says:

   8/23/2004 at 9:29 am

   In short, put whatever you want in your feed, aggregators should be using GUID, not MD5, to look for new posts.

   Using MD5 results in flagging new posts if someone removes some whitespace, fixes a comma or perhaps a spelling error. All of which are annoying…

   See also: http://www.robinsonhouse.com/2.....ds-broken/
2. James E. Robinson, III (5 comments.) says:

   8/23/2004 at 1:40 pm

   See also: http://archive.scripting.com/2.....:7:48:18AM
3. helge (4 comments.) says:

   8/23/2004 at 4:24 pm

   1. should be removed again. (thanks for fixing #1 in this list: http://www.helge.at/archives/00000094.php but: read the end of paragraph #4. this is really deteriorating the subscription experience.)
4. Mark says:

   8/23/2004 at 4:40 pm

   I have removed the number of comments for now and will just include a comments link for those interested.

   However, in spite of my conformity, I disagree with a few of your thoughts. It is the task of the feed reader to correctly understand and interprit the feeds just as it is the task of the feed author to provide semantic material. Caching readers should take updates into account and should allow the confiuration of feeds to either follow or disregard minor changes in posts.

   The difference between disguised links and otherwise is a limitation of encoded content and excerpt.
5. Nik (5 comments.) says:

   8/23/2004 at 7:31 pm

   I agree with you that the reader should indeed take into account the guid or any other identifying IDs (most readers, rawdog included, handle different formats and therefore they may support formats with different ids or no ids at all). Seeing that they don’t, even if the error is at the part of the reader, I really appreciate you removing the comment numbers. Thank you very much.

   Cheers

   Nik
6. Jesus (5 comments.) says:

   8/21/2004 at 2:00 pm

   I like the feed as it is now. I think it is the “standard” way, and for me, it is the best.
7. Nik (5 comments.) says:

   8/21/2004 at 6:14 pm

   Thanks for bringing up this issue for public discussion. To illustrate the problem it brings, each new item indexed becomes an md5 hash or similar, and is marked as new when that hash is not already shown before. The reader I use is rawdog, and to give you a sample and a look at how this will lead to the post being shown every time a new comment goes in, do see my bookmarks and news feeds.

   Now, do comment links have a right in the RSS feed? I think not. Reason being, when I read a blog entry (like this one), I simply click on the entry and I get right to the page, ususally (like this one) including a place for me to leave the comment. Thus, that link is a duplicate and adds no new functionality.

   So, to answer your questions:
   1. Yes, I believe it is duplicate and adds noise, so it should be removed.
   2. I prefer feeds with the entire story, but I realise that some places need to show their ads and thus only post an excerpt. If your message is more important than the actual visit to your site, you may not want to use excerpts.
   3. If getting to a comment for some reason isn’t the same as getting to the page, there may be a reason. But this link should then not changing thus indicating that the news has changed. Allowing a reader to subscribe to the comments for a discussion he finds interesting is good. Most blogs I read (ok, I read mainly wordpress blogs) send me new comments by email when I post a comment like this, but giving the possibility to subscribe to a comment-series without commenting definetly has its merit. But not in this incarnation with links like Comment(0), Comment(1), Comment(2) etc.

   I’m sorry if my writing’s a bit unstructured and/or unclear but it’s getting late and I’m off to bed. Good thing you bring this up.

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1. Nik's blog » Blog Archive » RSS entries’ uniqueness and comments says:

   8/21/2004 at 10:54 pm

   […] am by niklas hoops, I seem to have sparked a debate on RSS feeds and comments at WebLog Tools Collection. Good to have these […]