Library clips

[Update 26/07/06: coComment is crawling to the top]

Both mashable and Solution Watch have posted about Commentful.

It seems to be another comments tracker, most similar to co.mments.

What I like about co.mments is that if I want to follow comments on a blog post I just hit the bookmarklet, and it adds it to my account.

To see the latest I can goto my account or just use the take away method and read it in my house at Rojo, ie. my RSS feed for co.mments.

If I do goto my account what I see is a list of all the blog posts I’m tracking, if there is a new comment it will display this and I can expand it to read it, when I’m done I just press “clear”…this means I’ve marked the comment as read and I’ll await any new ones. Or if I no longer want to follow the post I can just “remove” it.

co.mments also have a community homepage…it’s just a stream where you can see blog posts being tracked by the whole co.mments community, it also has a handy “track this” button.

As mentioned on mashable you can put a button in the footer of your blog post so people with one click can add your blog post to their co.mments account (this is instead of using the bookmarklet).

I have already got a comments feed for this blog, and also a comments feed for each post…but some people like managing the blogs they are tracking in one spot, and this is exactly what co.mments is offering.

The posts above mention that Commentful is a bit different in subtle ways:
- it only alerts you of the new comment, but you have to go to the actual blog post to read it
- the browser extensions notify you of new entries via an icon on the browser you can even use the extension to add to Commentful
- it has a a limit of tracking 30 sites, and auto-deletes a site after 3 days

I haven’t used Commentful because Brian’s screenshots and great explanations say it all…anyway it seems co.mments does just a little more for me, so I’m not moving for now…although the browser features are a real temptation.

NOTE: Both Commentful and co.mments will track comments left by anyone (they don’t have to know these services even exist)…whereas CoComments (a social comments service) will only notify you of a new comment on a blog if the person who made the comment is registered with CoComments (I think this is still the case).

Related:
Managing and tracking comments
CoComments: comments haven

Similar:
Blog chats
Webride : discuss a webpage tagging service

Example

I have the 2 links below on my permalink page, use either of these to track comments on this blog post:

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Track comments on this blog post with co.mments -
(this button is found in a section called “Other”).

More just for fun

Maybe you want to comment about this blog post somewhere else like Webride:

Maybe you want to privately chat about this blog post with Conversate:

Maybe you want to publicly chat about this blog post with Gabbly or 3bubbles:

Feedshow has released an OPML Builder.

What you can do is list a whole heaps of RSS URL’s in the box and click submit, it will generate a once only OPML URL (Reading List).

It’s a bit like the OPML Generator, but better as it doesn’t just give you code or a file, it actually gives you a unique URL.

You could do this the long way with OPML Workstation, where you can always re-edit and do lots more stuff, but if it’s a quick fix, then OPML builder is the tool.

I’ll just mention here that OPML Builder will only allow you to make OPML Reading Lists, the URL’s have to be feeds, there is no option of setting the type value to “link”, etc…

Another limitation is that unlike OPML Workstation, there is no login, which means you can’t go back and add/delete an item from your OPML.

Another similar tool is Tony Hirst’s Social Bookmarking RSS Feeds - OPML Generator…see more.

Tony has also knocked upon one for news engines, see the Persistent News Search OPML Feedroll Generator.

More

Anyway, the real power of the Feedshow OPML Builder is that you can enter a given URL and it will strip all the links off the webpage and put them in the box…only thing is that since this builder is limited to RSS URL’s you have to pick out and delete the bad eggs.

Another way of doing it choosing a file extension filter, but this didn’t help for me, I whacked in my blog homepage and filtered for .rss, but I don’t have any links on my homepage with .rss…my feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/LibraryClips.

What I did was use the other filter technique, they also offer a custom filter box.
When I put in this custom filter…http://feeds* it just returned the URL’s that started with these characters, and it worked, I got my post and comments feeds as the only entries.

Again Tony Hirst steps up to the plate, another tool of his is pageLinks2OPML, but this is different as it uses a bookmarklet…this bookmarklet will scrape all the URL’s on a given page and create an OPML URL, just like that.
The bad part about this is that you can’t do any cleaning up like you can when you have a text box to play around in before you submit to create your OPML URL.

Actually, I posted about getting this bookmarklet to just recognise the post titles on my blog homepage and ignore all the other hyperlinks, and what do you know, he knocked up a personal gift (I found it at the end of this post)…thanks Tony (NOTE: It’s not working properly for me at the moment).

See also:
Newsmastering and advertising
Print a blog post via a 3rd party

Other ways to make Reading Lists type OPML:
Ways tomake Reading Lists so far
More ways to create and use Reading Lists