Lately I’ve been reading a ton of sites daily (65 at current count) via NetNewsWire Lite. While this allows me to skim through a huge amount of information in a short time, one of the disadvantages is that none of the RSS feeds that the sites provide give any information on comments to a given post (this isn’t a limitation of NetNewsWire at all, it’s part of how the RSS feed is written). Since I’ve often found some really interesting stuff in the discussion threads after a post, this is a bit of a downside.

So, while I doubt that very many people subscribe to my RSS feed, I figured I’d at least make my feed give me the information I want, and changed my feed template slightly. Where the code used to say…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]></content:encoded>

…I’ve altered it to say this…

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<$MTEntryBody$>]]><MTEntryIfAllowComments> <![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryCommentCount$> Comments)]]></MTEntryIfAllowComments><MTEntryIfAllowPings><![CDATA[ (<$MTEntryTrackbackCount$> TrackBack Pings)]]></MTEntryIfAllowPings></content:encoded>

…so that in my RSS feed, there’s a short display line that tells whether I’ve gotten any comments or TrackBack pings for an entry.

Maybe if I’m really lucky, someone a little higher up in the blogosphere heirarchy will stumble across this and the idea will start to spread.

[See also: Destinations | Issue with my comments-only feed | RSS Templates for TypePad Pro/MovableType | Help search engines index your site | Transitioned ]

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