A good while ago I added into the BlogSphere RSS feed a special tag for each RSS item that would point to an individual RSS feed for that items comments. At the time there was no RSS reader that supported the new feature so I promptly forgot all about it and it has been part of the template since.
Last week while away on a business trip I wanted to catch up on all the blogs so I downloaded SharpReader, a great RSS reader that I had used before and really liked. I then loaded up the OPML file from News4Notes and started reading the blogs.
Much to my surprise I noticed that beside all the entries for blogs based on BlogSphere ( and also the NotesTips site ) there was a little plus symbol and clicking on the symbol caused SharpReader to fetch the RSS feed that was associated with that items comments.
This is really a great way of catching up with not only the blog entries but also the comments for the entries too. I hope that this functionality is eventually put into a few of the other RSS readers and more importantly into the other blog template that people are using.
SharpReader also has some great threading functions, it can link different RSS feeds from different sites if it finds links in the RSS feed that point to permalinks that it has found in the other sites RSS feed. Really clever stuff.
You’re right that this is extremely cool – I downloaded it right away to try it, and it rocks. I’ve been wishing for this (without being able to put it into words) since I first started following blogs. One serious question, however: How is it that your BlogSphere feed behaves correctly, while the rest of us seem to be stuck with an infinite nesting structure of comments? Or at least Bruce Elgort and myself have that issue – I haven’t checked the other BlogSpherians. It may have something to do with the way SharpReader reports validation issues with our Comments feeds?
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Hello,
You can try also RSSReader http://www.rssreader.com/ that is also freeware. It has cool things but I would like to have one reader with the features of both RRSReader and SharpReader.
See you.
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