Tag Archives: rss

Do you make comments on others’ blogs? Bookmark and share them!

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You may notice (on the right hand side of this site, if you use the default view; or see image below), a list headed “My comments elsewhere”, with links to other people’s blog posts, on which I’ve recently commented.

List of the five last posts on which I commented, each linked to the post concerned

Screen shot of my recent comments, at the time of writing

I’ve been asked how I do this.

Every time I comment on a blog post — and I try to do so often, both to show my interest in others’ work, and to be part of their conversations — I bookmark that post on the site Delicious Pinboard, and tag it “comment”.

I then pass the RSS feed of all my bookmarks with that tag: http://feeds.pinboard.in/rss/u:pigsonthewing/t:comment/ to WordPress (the software I use to author and host this blog), which magically displays a list of the most recent five, as you can see.

The full feed is, of course, also available to anyone who wishes to subscribe to it in the feed reader of their choice; and my tagged comments can also be read as a web page.

In this way, as well as telling my readers what I’ve done, I bring extra attention to the blogs I comment on, thereby helping, albeit in a small way, their authors.

Why not bookmark your comments, and put a feed of them on your own blog?

Update: Delicious became awful when it relaunched, I now use Pinboard.

Update: You can also use this technique to add the list of your comments (specifically, the relevant URL on the bookmarking site) as a “work”, in your profile page on services which list your publications, such as ORCID.

Google Reader's great, but it could be even better

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Here’s another screenshot (linked to a larger version; thank you Flickr).

[link to large image of Google Reader screen-shot]

This one shows some of the RSS feeds I follow, in Google Reader. I only started using that service recently, and I’m finding very compelling (and time consuming!) both on my desktop PC, as shown here, and on my mobile device, using the stripped down and rather splendid mobile interface. However, I think the desktop interface — if I can call it that — could be improved and made more usable.

Firstly, I’d like a “mark as read” (or “ignore”, with the same effect) button, so that I can skip over posts which look uninteresting, without having to open and then close them to do so. It could go to the right of the “star” icon (highlighted yellow — and what’s that for? I can find no explanation, other than references to apparent side-effects of using it, in the help pages).

Also, if I select the title of a feed , such as “BBC News | News front” (a truncation of …News Front Page”; marked in orange), surely I can reasonably expect the view of that feed to open, instead of the specific post? That would be the same action as when I select the feed’s title in the left-hand column. The post’s title, to the right of the feed title, is a large-enough target to work in its own right.

Lastly, there are two “refresh” buttons (each highlighted in red). These, stupidly, have different functions. The one in the left-hand column refreshes all the feeds, while the one at the top refreshes the feed I’m viewing. If I use the latter, it clears read items from the current feed view, but annoyingly that doesn’t happen if I use the former — what’s that about? Either the two buttons should have the same effect, or they should be labelled differently.

I’d like to let Google know what I think, but — in typical Google fashion — they don’t seem to provide a mechanism for me to do so.

Postscript: The URL provided by Google for my “publicly shared items” in Google Reader, which anyone can visit, is the mind-bogglingly unmemorable, untypeable and generally unfriendly http://www.google.com/reader/shared/03499548569546420688. Why can’t I have http://www.google.com/reader/shared/pigsonthewing ?

Spatial references to page layout considered harmful

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This screenshot (linked to a larger version) shows a TechCrunch article in Google Reader, as it appears “out of the box” (apart from cropping, blurring irrelevant content and the addition of orange highlighting). Note the position of the logo, described as being “shown at right”.

[Screenshot of Google Reader]

In this era of mobile devices, feed readers and other such proxies — not to mention aural browsers and assistive devices with no spatial component — referring to the location of an element on the screen is stupid. Harmful, even.