Sometimes you might forget where did you left your comments, and miss response to that comment. Or you are just interested what people will say in the comments of certain post. One way to do this is to subscribe to the ‘comment feed’ through some feed reader. As I’m not using feed readers (I’ve covered my need to track what is happening in the philosophy blogs through power-blogroll page), I checked what was the way to track comments.
Seems that there are two most popular online comment tracking systems. One is co.mments and the other is coComment. After reading what they provide, coComment seemed as a better choice. Because…
a)it provides a plug-in (extension) for Firefox which catches the cases when you add a comment, so it automatically starts to track that conversation where you added comments (there is also options to add comment without tracking, or to track without adding comments and to add tags to the conversation). On another side co.mments doesn’t provide that. It gives you just a bookmark (which you drag to your bookmarks, or to your bookmarks toolbar), so you need to click to say ‘I want to track comments to this conversation’ (BTW coComment also gives such option)
b)there are some advanced social features in coComment, such that you can make your comments public, people can follow where you comment, you can follow other people, and so on…
Anyway, given those things, I decided to install coComment. Alas, it would be good if it worked in first place. I added several conversations, but the comments were not shown. Or, 5 comments were shown, and there were for example 10 comments. So, I removed coComment, and went to try co.mments. And it worked. And it is simple. After trying it, I don’t even think I need all those bells and whistles from coComment. When you want to track the comments to some post, you just open the post and click the bookmark on your toolbar. When you go to your page, you see something like this. You mark some conversations as read if you want (‘Clear’ button), or remove them altogether.
And as a good thing you have a public RSS feed in the form – http://co.mments.com/people/tgjorgoski;feed (where tgjorgoski is my username), which you can add to your blog if you have one, so that other people can see where you commented also. If you want to check, I added the RSS widget for that feed to this blog in the left-side column of my blog.
For WordPress, you go to to your Presentation options, then to the Widgets, drag/drop RSS widget to your side bar, click on the ‘configure’ part of that button, and add the RSS url there.
For Blogger, in the Template , click ‘add a page element’ in the side bar, choose the Feed element, and then set the feed URL.
If you leave lot of comments, and want a way to track them, I think you should try co.mments.
Technorati Tags: co.mments, coComment, tracking comments, comment feeds
A brood comb 