FeedFlare, Disqus and gReader
In my last post I asked the question, “how can I show how many comments my entries have in my feed?” I actually sent an email to TechDirt (since I read their feed and it has that feature) and Dennis Yang (who is on Twitter too!) wrote me a very nice explanatory email. Apparently, this isn’t as unusual a question as I supposed, because FeedBurner has already thought of it. Their support is built in to a feature called FeedFlare.
FeedFlare does many things, like allowing the feed owner to add subscribe and email this links to each entries, plus (obviously) number of comments. I think this cements my plans to move to using FeedBurner, there are just too many compelling reasons to not do it, and, it’s all free. That’s probably the best reason.
So how does this relate to Disqus and gReader, you are asking? Well, Disqus (pronounced discuss, I am guessing) is an online commentary-tracking system that “plugs in” to a number of different blogs and sites, allowing someone to sign up once (sort of like OpenID) but also keep track of all their comments across all the sites using Disqus.. where other Disqus users can follow their comments (like Twitter) and build a social network as well. I could write a whole review of Disqus and I think I will, but not today.
Moving on to gReader, I found out about this on the Disqus blog. What this cool Firefox extension does is enable active Disqus comment tracking and responding from within Google Reader! And if you use the bookmarklet, you can enable commenting on any page, even if that site doesn’t have explicit Disqus support! Very sweet.
I have a bunch of work to do actually, I am now itching on getting this extension installed, as well as switching this blog over to FeedBurner.