Solo Technology

Do you read a lot of blogs? Or more importantly, do you leave comments on a lot of blogs? When leaving a comment, how do you keep track of it to see if there’s any conversation sparked?

A fair number of WordPress blogs use the Subscribe to Comments plugin. The description reads:

Subscribe to Comments is a robust plugin that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries. The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address.

Robust is a great description — it’s truly very slick. If you subscribe to the article, you’ll get an email anytime someone else leaves a comment. I have it installed here, in fact.

But it isn’t the answer for tracking all your comments on all blogs, is it? Not all blogs are WordPress, for instance. Not all WP blogs run it. We need something more centralized for the goal of tracking all comments.

That brings us to the next option: Co.mments.com. (previous mentions here) This one works a bit differently. First you’ll need a (free) account. Then you’ll add their bookmarklet to your browser. From the home page:

You post a comment on a blog. How do you know if anyone responded? You read an interesting post. How do you know when there are new comments?

Use co.mments to bookmark posts you want to follow. It tracks new comments for you, so you don’t miss out. You can see all the new comments from your tracking page, or subscribe to the feed.

In fact, you don’t even have to leave a comment if you want to follow discussion on a post. Just mark it anyways, and as new comments are left you’ll be notified. I’ve never checked; I wonder if that’s possible with subscribe to comments?

This is the one I tend to use the most. It offers a feed of comment activity so I just subscribe to that in my feed reader. You can also opt to receive emails when comments are added if email is more your thing.

It works great, but every now and then my bookmarklet times out when I want to mark a comment I just left. I’m not sure if it is server stability on their end, network latency or browser — but it can be a bit annoying.

Another option is CoComment. It is very similar to co.mments in that you again add a bookmarklet to your browser and get a free account with them. The wrinkle is that you write your comment, click the CoComment bookmarklet or (Firefox) extension button, then submit the comment.

The site warns about Opera compatibility. Bah.

I’ve not messed with it much since I very briefly looked at it last year. As I recall, initially I thought it was rather slick, but I like co.mments better as it’s easier to use (send comment, then mark post. No interim step to remember).

One last option to consider is that many blogs will offer a comment feed for an article. Leave your comment, then subscribe to the feed. It works well enough, but it gets rather unwieldy over time in my opinion.

Are there any other options that I missed and should consider?

3 Responses to “Comment Tracking”

1. Vox on May 28th, 2007 2:27 am
   

   You are forgetting the CoComment firefox plugin…you install it, write your comments and forget about clicking bookmarklets before or after…then you see the small icon in your statusbar turn from blue to orange when somebody answers in the thread, click the icon and go to your CoComments page…nothing is easier than that

2. Chris on May 28th, 2007 8:12 am
   

   Are you using CoComment, Vox? What’s your general take on it (aside from the nice FF support)?

3. Vox on May 28th, 2007 3:54 pm
   

   Well, I don’t follow as many comment threads as you probably do, being as I rarely write any comments But so far, I’ve had no complaints about it…it does its job, it does it well, with no fancy fluff, so…it’s good enough for me

Leave a Reply