dekstop: weblog

I've just implemented article feeds for this blog, which is a great feature for everybody who wants to track comments on a particular article, or for people who want to track updates on articles that are too old to be included in the blog's main feed.

Originally I simply wanted to add a comments feed for each individual article -- currently I only offer a single combined feed of all comments, and that's usually not what anybody is interested in. Why should you suffer from receiving many irrelevant entries if you're only interested in comments on a particular article? And as I'm notified of new comments via email this comments feed isn't even of much use to myself -- I'm subscribed to the combined comments feed, but by the time NNW updates it I've already read the comment.

Then I just saw how Sam Ruby implements article feeds for his blog, Intertwingly: the first feed entry is the article itself, and all consecutive entries are comments on the article. And I think that's a really great idea: Because if you're interested to read comments on an article you will probably also be interested in reading updates on the article itself. And it makes for a more complete feed reading experience: now an article's feed contains the same information as the article page itself, it's just two formats of the same data.

Article feeds are referenced on two locations of every article page: For human eyes there's a short text between an article and its comments that links to an article's feed; and for aggregators, feed bookmarklets and other machines every article page now has a <link> to its feed representation (look at the HTML source of an article to see this).

I've also made some changes to the blog's main RSS feed: It now contains multiple categories for articles, and also the full author name on each article.

The new feeds nearly validate: The RSS 2.0 spec requires the <author> field to contain an email address, and I've chosen to only insert a name. This has been true for the old comments feed for a while, and is an issue a lot of feed authors have with the RSS 2.0 spec -- in an age of sophisticated spam bots nobody in their clear mind chooses to publish email addresses in the clear any more. (Which is also why I've decided to drop MovableType's mandatory email field for comments a long time ago.)

I then updated the blog's OPML file to also point to comment feeds; and with a little tweaking the OPML finally validates...

Let me know if there is a desire for category feeds as well.

Update: 2006-03-20 -- I've migrated the old comments feed from RSS 0.91 to RSS 2.0. Am now thinking about using Dublic Core's <dc:creator> as a replacement for RSS 2.0's <author> property.

Update: 2006-03-20 -- Oh, and I'm thinking about adding search result feeds -- which might be even cooler than category feeds. We'll see.

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