Installed RSS Count Comments

1/17/2010, 11:54 pm, Wordpress

Update 1-18-10: I have temporarily(?) disabled this plugin. Read the comments.

I just installed RSS Count Comments. Findable on WordPress.

When you read my RSS feed, you’ll now see the number of comments in each post. So a title might read:

It Was on Fire When I Got Here (3 comments)

I installed this because comments are so very important but you’d easily miss them when reading just the RSS feed.

I encourage all my friends to install this very small plugin! It’s just 7 lines of code. :-)

6 Comments

Jesse says:

1/18/2010 at 2:00 pm

Since the title of the post changes after you get a comment, how to you prevent RSS readers from thinking they are two different posts?
lee says:

1/18/2010 at 3:33 pm

Damn you Jesse Zbikowski. Damn you to hell!

Didn’t I damn you yesterday too? You’re like my conscience, really good to have around despite the nuisance.
Jesse says:

1/18/2010 at 4:07 pm

Maybe it’s the guid tag. I tried to get commenting to work inside an RSS feed using the textInput tag but the readers all seem to ignore it.

lee says:

1/18/2010 at 4:17 pm

I’ve never looked into the RSS that WordPress spits out.
I’m looking at the RSS feed right now for this wordpress blog and I see:


<item>
<title>test (1 comments)</title>
<link>http://lee.org/blog/2010/01/18/test/</link>
<comments>http://lee.org/blog/2010/01/18/test/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:14:25 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>lee</dc:creator>
<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

<guid isPermaLink="false">http://lee.org/blog/?p=3335</guid>
<description><![CDATA[ignore
]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>ignore</p>
]]></content:encoded>
<wfw:commentRss>http://lee.org/blog/2010/01/18/test/feed/</wfw:commentRss>
<slash:comments>1</slash:comments>
</item>

What’s that “slash:comments”. I’m looking….

lee says:

1/18/2010 at 4:25 pm

Ugh, I don’t have time to bang on this right now. I’ll look at it after I’m back from India. In the mean time, I’ll disable this plugin.

Jesse, yeah, I’d guess the guid tag is the official one. It looks like the RSS reader built into Internet Explorer reads the “slash:comments” tag but not Google Reader. There’s gotta be a spec out there. And I’d bet that “slash:comments” isn’t in it. Ha, slash:comments comes from Slashdot. That’s silly.

There’s got to be a better way!
Jesse says:

1/18/2010 at 5:50 pm

Well FWIW it is working fine in Google Reader, by which I mean new comments do not cause the item to appear again after it’s been read.

Lee.org