Tracking Comments

Richard Tallent has a general proposal for tracking blog comments that you've posted to other blogs, using a "Trackback or Pingback like mechanism. That's what trackback does. Now a lot of weblogs group trackback separately from other comments, but then there's Sam Ruby's weblog, where trackbacks go right inline with comments. In my mind, Sam has the best presentation for trackbacks, and a lot of the weblog engines out there need to get on the ball (when I get around to fixing trackback on this weblog, it'll end up looking something like Sam's). So let's say you post to your own weblog, in a category that doesn't show up on the front page; now you've got essentially what Richard's looking for. The problem is that tb doesn't necessarily get combined with comments by all weblog engines, and that some implementations (MT, for example) limit trackback excerpts to 255 characters.

Another option is to use an aggregator like RSS Bandit, which supports the WFW Comment API. RSS Bandit tracks items you've posted in a separate Sent Items folder. The problem with that is that the Comment API isn't very widely supported by servers, and there's precious few aggregators that do either, the only ones I know of are RSS Bandit and BottomFeeder.

— Gordon Weakliem at permanent link